British UNIMA Centre Bulletin, Issue 100, March 1999

BrUNIMA Bulletin No 100 MARCH 7999

re
xe reve

SK.

Cr 5 : eK ;

Aaa BI OAQSIOI OE Gy,

\ Brees WA eee eaters, Zax Pe

Qe ie aS
BLY % v :

ony,

MARCH 1999

Editorial
There would be no point in an organization
like ours, in which the word international
appears, having a publication which was not
outward looking. However, this editor has
few, if any, fixed ideas on what shape the
Bulletin should assume, although he is
willing to give writers more space — running
a piece over more than one issue if need be —
than they might ordinarily be accorded
elsewhere. It can be as protean as its
contributors make it, but, just in case
members should not realize, I thought it
worthwhile to repeat here that reviews are
welcome, particularly of foreign shows, of
course, but homegrown need not be
parochial, and quality — whether at home or
abroad — deserves recognition. There has in
fact been quite a lot of puppetry on view of
late: the London Festival of Puppetry for
Adults at the Rosemary Branch Theatre;
Kazuko Hohki’s Toothless at the BAC; the
London International Mime Festival;
Shockheaded Peter and Cinderella, both at
the Lyric Hammersmith; Joe Gladwin’s paper
Cinderella premiere at the BAC; the Arabian
Nights at the Young Vic.... In some of these
shows puppetry is central, in others not, but
the increasing ability of puppetry to be
“taken for granted” in the theatre, as just one
of several ingredients, is anyway, it seems to
me, a boon. You will no doubt spend much
more time on analyzing Faulty Optic’s
tunnelvision than the use of a puppet
in the Welsh National Opera’s Hansel
and Gretel, but it would still be
interesting to hear how well or badly

NO 100

the puppet is used in the latter.
despite the theatrical feast that can be on the

And yet,

menu, little mail containing reviews is
received. I cannot believe that members do
not go to shows and do not have views
thereupon.

Perhaps I am saying the obvious, but not
everything needs strictly be about puppets,
even if, clearly, most of what appears here
will be. It was good, for example, to receive
a few lines on an exhibition of drawings and
paintings by Franciszka Themerson. There
was not a single puppet or puppeteer, though
there were quite a lot of musicians, depicted
on the walls of the Cork St Gallery.

‘However, she is very well known for the

production of Ubu which she designed for
Meschke in 1964 (she was made a Member
of Honour of UNIMA in 1976), and, in my

. view, it is interesting to be made aware of the

range of makers’ work. Short as well as
long items are welcome.

The last Newsletter encouraged readers to
go and see “Grinling Gibbons and the Art of
Carving” at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
It would have been pleasing to have received
a review of it. There was not a puppet in
sight there either, though — as an angler — I
particularly relished the exceedingly fine fish,
fowl, and crustaceans of the Kirtlington
Panels, but this was surely something (there
was even a cabinet packed with tools, and
technical data) a puppet carver could cast an
appreciative eye over. It was
interesting to learn that this artist
who seems so much a part of our

| The Scissorman from Shockheaded Peter

tradition was, while of English parentage,
born in Rotterdam (1648) and remained on
the continent throughout his apprenticeship.
This makes a lot of sense when you have
even a little familiarity with the continental
tradition of limewood sculpture.

My thanks, as always, to contributors, and
just in case this editorial should be thought a
little schoolmasterly, let me say that I believe
in the pleasure principle, and much
enjoyment in puppetry is, I believe, recorded
by contributors to these pages (admittedly,
occasionally enhanced, it would seem, by
alcohol). I would only wish that more of vou
would share your pleasure.

Non-#x Cathedra Remarks
Ray DaSilva

For those who like numbers, we have just
held BrUNIMA’s 35" annual members’
meeting and are now in the 70" year of
UNIMA. More about the AGM in the next
Newsletter but just enough space here to say
a big THANK YOU to the Puppet Centre for
hosting the event so marvellously. You may
also have noticed that this is the 100" issue
of our Bulletin, and as usual, Robert Fowler
has come up trumps again with a fine array
of internationally-based articles. I know that
some of you are rather modest and need
much cajoling in order to extract these
contributions and also that we are all very
busy, nevertheless, both the Bulletin and the
Newsletter received praise from members at
the AGM, and were cited by some as the
reason for joining the organisation, so do
piease keep your contributions coming.

The other thing for which we need your
help is the National Directory of Puppets and
Related Materials in museums. This project,
in case you haven’t noticed, is being
undertaken by all the national puppeteers’
organisations. We have already had response
from a few members (one member has
covered 40 Scottish museums). Please
report to Douglas Hayward — whether there
are puppets or not in your local museum. If
there are, then please provide brief details. If

3

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
Cover picture, Semar see page 4

The Theatre State 4

Golden Sword — Raffles and the East 5

Wayang Golek — review

— Anna Ingleby 8

The Puppeteer’s Wayang 9

Mester Jakel, the Danish Punch

— John Morley 10
Henrik Keménvy and Vitez Laszlé 15
Small Talk

— John Furse 16
Paper Theatre at Troyes

— Charles Broughton 19
Cose italiane 59
Czech Republic 24
Belgium 24
Electronic Coordinates 24
Australian Scene

— Penny Francis 25
Media Watch 27
USA and Japan 28
Obituaries 29
Cribs 30
Franciszka Themerson 30
Byte Parts 31
Festivals 32
Festival Scholarships 34
Treasure Trove in Spain

— Stephen Sharples and Michelle Quick 3
there are other puppeteers living in your
town, then a simple phone call to them or
Douglas will ascertain whether or not they
have got there before you. Douglas’
telephone number is 01283 8403-48.

We are now in the final year of the current
Committee, elections will be held in
November. It would be good to have some
new blood, so if you are interested please let
me, or any Committee member know, as we
may be able to coopt you on to the current
Committee, so that you can find out how we
tick. To remind you, the present Committee
consists of: Meg Amsden, Cariad Astles,
Glyn Edwards, Robert Fowler, Penny
Francis, Anna Ingleby, Martin MacGilp,
Rachel Riggs, and Lorraine von Gehlen.

The 1999 stamp for your membership
card should be included with this
Bulletin.

If it is missing, then it is because our
records show that your 1999
subscription has not been received.
To maintain your membership, see
instructions on the enclosed
final reminder.

New Individual Members
Karin Andrews Carshalton
Alison Conti Felixtowe
Joe Gladwin London
Stephanie Green Carno, Powys
Jane Henderson Isleworth
Victor Lindegrine Whitstable
Steve Newton Okehampton
Jane Paterson Honiton
Kirsten Streitberger Exmouth
Rebekah Wild London

New Groups
On The Other Hand
Treasure Trove
New Overseas subscribers
Dennis Murphy Australia
Birgitta Robinger Sweden

London
Mold

The Theatre State
Peter Weir's The Year of Living
Dangerously, set in Java in 1965, when the
nationalist | President Sukarno was
overthrown by the military amid great
carnage, was shown on television just before
Christmas. A wayang kulit show forms the
background as the opening credits roll and
puppets feature significantly later. Their
symbolism within the
film is made explicit
when Billy Kwan
(Linda Hunt) explains
to the newly arrived
Australian radio
journalist Guy Hamilton

(Mel Gibson) the roles
played by Prince
Arjuna, Krishna, and

Semar — the clown-servant

Semar in the shadow play. Hamilton: “What
does he [Semar] do?” Kwan: “He serves the
prince.” Semar is said explicitly by (the
diminutive) Kwan to be a dwarf: Kwan is
Semar to Hamilton’s Aruna. Semar, who,
like the other panakawan (clown-servants),
is not in the Indian epics, is in fact a native
god (Ismaya) who possesses a_ whole
compendium of deformities and is
androgynous in nature. This latter aspect
being particularly interesting in the context of
the film, for — whether the conceit is intended
or not — Kwan/Semar is played by a woman
en travesti. Arjuna, the third of the Pandawa
brothers in the Mahabharata, is very
handsome as well as brave. The part of the
British Embassy’s Jill Bryant (Sigourney
Weaver) is not, as I recall, defined in wayang
terms, but she, like princesses and
maidservants alike in the epic, falls for this
homme fatal.

The film’s title goes back to President
Sukarno’s National Day Speech, 1964, “A
Year of Living Dangerously.” (Indonesian,
incidentally, suffers from dreadful
acronymitis — even native speakers can have
difficulty understanding their daily newspaper
— and Sukarno’s rhetoric abounded in such,
the above notion being compressed into the
macaronic acronym favip, comprising tahun
(the Indonesian for “year’) and vivere
pericoloso.)

Continuing the linguistic theme, I should
like to quote the conclusion of Elizabet
Lind’s article “The Rhetoric of Sukarno” (in
Indonesia and Malaysia — Scandinavian
studies in contemporary society, edited by T
Svensson and Per Sgrensen, Curzon Press,
1983):

“I have argued that in validating his
charisma Sukarno modelled his speeches on
the Javanese wayang play, its structure, and
its rhetoric. This lay close at hand as in the
traditional Javanese society the wayang play
served as a vehicle for disseminating political
messages. President Suharto, who lacks
Sukarno’s charismatic appeal and who is a
less skilled orator, continues to use wayang

for political purposes. Within the framework
of Repelita (Rencana Pembangunan Lima
Tahun) ‘The Five Year Development
Programme’, that was started in 1969,
Suharto summoned dhalangs from Java,
Madura, Sumatra (those were exiled
Javanese), and Bali to Jakarta for a briefing.
In his speech to the dhalangs he echoes
Sukarno. The dhalangs, he was convinced,
wanted to take part in the Indonesian
People’s fight for achieving ‘a just and
prosperous society.’ In order to reach this
goal the consciousness of the Indonesian
People had to be awakened. The dhalang’s
task must be to stimulate and arouse the
People’s consciousness. He concludes:

‘I am convinced that you Dalangs without
changes in your presentation of the /akons
[plays] and without altering the structure of
the pakem [the outline of the plot] will be
able to insert that which should be forwarded
to the people. This could be done in the
jokes or wherever you want to insert it. The
important thing is that [the message] should
be understood by as many as possible.””

PS: The first time I became aware of a
Javanese connection to Henri Cartier-
Bresson was some years ago, when watching
a television programme about the Magnum
photographic agency, which he founded,
during which he was interviewed in his
home, where wayang kulit were displayed.
Since then I have noticed some Indonesian
photographs by him, a couple of Balinese
dance photographs indeed were to be seen in
the just-ended Victoria and Albert Museum
exhibition celebrating his 90th birthday. His
first wife, Ratna Mohini, came from Java,
and he campaigned with her at the United
Nations in 1947 for Indonesian independence
from Dutch rule. He devoted special
attention to the Barong dance of Bali, which
also fascinated Antonin Artaud. I have not,
though, seen Cartier-Bresson’s book on
Balinese dance, published in 1954, which is
no doubt a collector’s item. Has he taken
any photographs of wayang?

The Golden Sword — Stamford

Raffles and the East
It is quite likely that if the name Raffles were
mentioned, gentleman burglar and/or a hotel
wherein the likes of Somerset Maugham and
Noel Coward sipped Singapore Slings would
be the response. EW Hornung’s creation is
beside the point, the Raffles Hotel (albeit not
established until 61 years after the death of
the bearer of that name) does at least have
the merit of commemorating Sir Stamford
(knighted 1817), whose founding of that
island state was just one of many splendid
achievements in his admirable, albeit short,
life (1781-1826). That lifetime’s work is
currently being fittingly marked (until 18
April) in the Ethnographic Department’s first
exhibition in its new home in the British
Museum.

Stamford Raffles, a man of very scant
formal education, contributed to many
spheres of knowledge. As the humane,
enlightened, and insubordinate (to the great
annoyance of his employer, the East India
Company) Lieutenant-Governor of Java
(1811-1815), for example, he was to fix —
through his collecting and his writing — our
persisting ideas of Java, namely, shadow
puppets, musical instruments, masks, stone
carvings, and cloth. I shall deal here only
with puppets and, to some extent, music.

The Raffles puppets are not unknown:
Jeune Scott-Kemball wrote Javanese shadow
puppets, a 65-page pamphlet on the Raffles
shadow puppets, in 1970 (a British Museum
publication long out of print, although copies
do occasionally turn up). However, the
opportunity to see them has been very
limited. (It will also be relatively limited
after the exhibition, which is why you should
not fail to go now: there are plans to display
parts of the Raffles Collection permanently
within the British Museum, but — for
conservation reasons — only some puppets,
on a rotational basis, will be exhibited.)
There are, according to Scott-Kemball, 283
wayang kulit and 80 accessories in the
Collection. There are other types of puppets

Gamelan instruments (L-R): bonang, rebab, gambang, gong 6

6

too — golek (three-dimensional wooden
puppets), and keruchil/klitik (flat wooden
puppets) — and these are all represented, in
very healthy numbers, in the exhibition.

The wayang kulit, which come from
Central Java, are interesting by virtue of their
age — they were acquired between 1811 and
1816, and some may be much older — and
their high level of craftsmanship — they are
working puppets and bear characteristic
signs of wear, tear, and repair (sometimes
disguised by having their “best side” on
display in the cases), but the colours, to cite
Scott-Kemball, “generally present a brilliant
and crisp appearance.” You can also see
wayang golek and keruchil, but most
interesting and intriguing of all (although
underplayed — on the understandable grounds
that the exhibition is intended for the public
at large) is a unique type of small (no more
than about 30cm tall) three-dimensional
wooden puppet. The uniqueness of these
puppets (see photograph in ~ current
Animations, Feb/Mar), of which 21 are on
display, is that, while they resemble wayang
golek in their three-dimensionality, they
differ from them in that the clothing is carved
(which, incidentally, provides information on
early batik design) rather than being made of
fabric. The caption reads “many show signs
of once having been carefully labelled and
numbered.” Sadly, the absence of this
information (the Raffles Collection has had a
chequered past in the British Museum’s
hands, including woeful neglect and splitting
up) leaves us completely in the dark as to
how they were performed. Were they
forerunners of golek? We do not know. It
should be said that, while the curator, Nigel
Barley, contends that they are “obviously
puppets,” the Wayang Museum in Jakarta,
which has nothing like them in its holdings,
contests this. Professional jealously? For the
ordinary visitor, seeing them as puppets is, it

must be said, not helped by the lack of any
indication, either in the exhibition or in the
accompanying book, that the figures have
had their original (central) spike removed
and a display base fitted. Much investigative
work still remains to be done with all the
puppets in the Collection.

The range of puppets on display usefully
informs or reminds viewers that wayang
purwa, the stories of the Mahabharata and
Ramayana, is, despite its preeminence, not
the only tradition, and I should advise anyone
wishing to become (more) acquainted with
the mediaeval East Javanese romances of the
Princes Panji and Damarwulan to consult
Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof’s Dictionary of
Traditional South-East Asian Theatre
(Oxford in Asia Paperback, 1994, ISBN:
967-65-3032-8). This is a first-rate book,
whose only, minor, defect is that it classifies
the bulk of entries under vernacular names.
A further, more general recommendation —
sources not specifically about puppetry can
be immensely valuable — would include the
work of the Oxford historian Peter Carey.
His The British in Java 1811-1816 -— A
Javanese Account is a wonderful edition of a
babad (diary chronicle) kept by Panular, a
minor member of the Yogya royal house.
The immensely detailed and erudite
Historical Notes and Commentary
are a cornucopia of information on
the practices and mores of the
period, including wayang. Insight
into the important role played by
dhalangs is also afforded by
dipping into Dr Carey’s paper “The
Cultural Ecology of Early
Nineteenth Century Java.” Reading
of his short essay “Core and
Periphery, 1600-1830: Pasisir
Origins of Central Javanese ‘High
Court’ Culture” also helps redress
a certain prevailing historical
misreading of Javanese culture. He
concludes that “right up to the
outbreak of the Java War (1825-
30), South Central Java, today
regarded as the epitome of all that

is most refined in Javanese culture, was
deeply influenced by pasisir, particularly East
Javanese art forms.” (Pasisir, which literally
means coastal regions, is used for
convenience sake in the essay to subsume the
northeast coast and East Java.)

Tim Byard-Jones’s brief essay “The
Raffles Wayang Puppets,” in the book
accompanying the exhibition, is, while useful
(Byard-Jones is a practising dhalang
currently resident in Java), much more a
general account of Javanese puppets than the
title suggests. He may also “nod” at one
point when he writes: “wayang purwa
(‘original’ wayang) is the main classical form
and uses stories taken from the great
Sanskrit epics of the Mahabharata and
Ramayana, while wayang madya (‘middle’
wayang) is used to present stories taken from
the medieval romances about the Princes
Panji and Damarwulan.” As I — not an
expert in this field — understand it, and
without going into too much detail, the
wayang madya plays are based on io".
century epic poetry, and the themes revolve
around the east Javanese prophet-king
Djajabaya. To quote James Brandon (p 8 of
On Thrones of Gold, which also supplies a
very useful table of wayang play cycles):
“The Surakarta court poet Ranggawarsita
wrote Pustaka Radja Madya, a genealogy of
Javanese kings said to be descendants of the
Pandawas, thus linking the Pandawa cycle
and the later Pandji cycle of plays.” The
Panji plays are actually part of the wayang
gedog cycle. I need to investigate this
further.

Byard-Jones points out that wayang is
traditionally described as saptamuka (seven-
faced), combining the arts of vocal music,
instrumental music, literature, story-telling,
carving, painting, and puppet manipulation,
and I confess I find his other contribution to

the book, “The Raffles Gamelans,”
more informative. There are two Raffles
gamelans, one is at the British Museum, the
other at Claydon House, Buckinghamshire.
In terms of carving, however, the highly
zoomorphic frames of the BM instruments —
peacocks, dragons, deer — easily outshine
their Plain Jane country cousins. An
exhibition caption reads intriguingly that the
eminent musicologist Dr Crotch declared the
sound of Raden Rana Dipura (who
accompanied Raffles to England) playing on
the gambang (metallophone) to “bear a
strong resemblance to the most ancient music
of Scotland.” According to Neil Sorrell, A
Guide to the Gamelan, the Raffles
instruments remained the only ones here until
1977, when the Indonesian Embassy in
London acquired a set from Solo, named
Gamelan Kyai Rawatmeja, whereas today,
according to Byard-Jones, Britain has about
50 active gamelan groups.

I was aware that Western composers have
been inspired by gamelan since Debussy and
knew Benjamin Britten as the British
composer most closely associated with
gamelan (indeed his recording debut was as a
participant in a piano duet, in 1941,
performing Colin McPhee’s Balinese
Ceremonial Music, based on the Canadian’s
research in Bali in the mid-1930s). I had
seen the gamelan-influenced The Prince of
the Pagodas danced at Covent Garden three
or four years ago, but the following twist in
the story of the ballet’s creation (see Bayan
Northcott’s article “Multicultural pick-and-
mix” in The Independent, 5 2 99), which
nicely illustrates art’s absorptive powers and
the sometimes complicated nature of
influence, was new to me. In 1956 Benjamin
Britten made a trip to Bali to research and
make recordings of gamelan in preparation
for his ballet. However, a striking passage in
Act Il of that work actually derives from a

recording made in London by a visiting
Balinese ensemble in 1952. What research
later demonstrated, however, is that the track
in question was inspired by Britten’s own
music. The manager of the Balinese visit,
wishing the players to devise an opening
number that would bridge the cultural gap
for Western listeners, had played them The
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Yet
Britten seems to have been unaware at the
time of the recording’s provenance, and this
is perhaps no wonder, since, to the Western
ear, even so acute a Western ear as Britten’s,
this piece sounds as Balinese as the rest.

The remaining essays cover other aspects
of Raffles’ life. Do not (because of the title)
neglect Joe Cribb’s fascinating contribution,
“Raffles’s Magic Coins,” which traces back
the depiction of an early version of the Panji
story on the coins collected by Raffles to the
pre-Islamic period.

If you enjoyed the wry wit and learning of
Nigel Barley’s Zhe Innocent Anthropologist
and Not a Hazardous Sport, then The Duke
of Puddle Dock: Travels in the footsteps of
Stamford Raffles will not disappoint. By the
way, the curator of the exhibition, both in the
book of the show and the biography, argues
that Raffles expected to go down in history
as a natural historian. He founded, along
with Sir Humphry Davy, the Zoological
Society of London, today’s London Zoo, in
his last year of his life. And he is
commemorated by the Rafflesia arnoldii, the
“stinking corpse lily,” a parasitic flower up to
94cm in diameter. Crowds queued at Kew in
the summer of 1996 in the hope
(disappointed, I recall) of witnessing the very
rare blossoming of the titan arum, a plant
which also comes from Sumatra and
possesses a carrion-rich aroma. How these
compare with the fetid sickliness of the
durian (see Yule and Burnell’s Hobson-
Jobson for an array of aromatic
descriptions), which I have sampled, I cannot
say, but Indonesia does seem to have
cornered the world market in malodorous
plants.

In connection with the Raffles exhibition Anna
Ingleby will be providing a free demonstration/
workshop at the British Museum on Tuesday 6 April,
at llam, lpm, and 2pm. This will comprise a
Cirebonese mask dance, some brief glimpses of
wayang golek movement, and some discussion of
these forms, including — for younger members of the
audience — a quick look at the kuda Jumping horse
dance. In the last issue I mentioned a 25-minute-
long BBC programme called “Wayang Golek —
Puppeteers of West Java.” Anna kindly agreed to
review it.

Wayang Golek — Puppeteers of West
Java
Anna Ingleby
The documentary with the above title
provides a very charming insight into the
vibrant yet lesser known art of wayang
golek, the three-dimensional wooden rod
puppets of Sunda.

Simon Cook clearly and _ concisely
explains some basic principles of the genre,
using the Rasta family in Bandung as an
example. We see extracts of a performance
by Atik Rasta and his group of musicians,
which includes many family members, not
least being his father, Otong Rasta, whose
grandfather came from Cirebon, on the north
coast (although that was not made clear in
the subtitles).

In Cirebon we can find an earlier (quite
rare) form called wayang cepak, whose
stories relate to the Islamic ones shared by
the mask dramas, and the puppets generally
have less movement. If Otong Rasta’s
grandfather did indeed come from Cirebon
and teach many dalang his art, this would
support the theory that wayang golek are the
descendants of wayang cepak in their
technique or shape at least, even if their
stories (as in this documentary) follow the
purwa_ stories of the Ramayana and
Mahabharata, which are believed to have
been developed from those used in the
wayang kulit of north and central Java.

In Bandung wayang golek have developed
very lively movements, different dalang
developing their own styles and strengths.
Perhaps the most innovative is Pak Asep

Sunander Sunarya, who introduced puppets
smoking real cigarettes, and wayang teknis —
“technical” puppets with exploding heads
which can vomit noodles or bleed red syrup
(although these are not frequently used).
Wayang golek is an art form which, unlike
wayang kulit, can incorporate many different
dance forms in its movement, and in this
documentary Atik Rasta provides us with a
good, high-quality glimpse of what we are
likely to see at a wayang golek show these
days.

We are also shown how the puppets are
carved, and during an interview with Atik
Rasta and one of his sons we very typically
see all the friends and neighbours gathered
round, proving that this filming has nothing
of the artificial air which occurs when
wayang golek are recorded for television
over in Indonesia! Seeing this and hearing
Sundanese accents instantly transported me
back to Bandung. When I left Bandung last
August, having lived there for two years, I
was afraid of feeling far away back in Britain,
but seeing this reminded me that once you
form an attachment to a place and/or specific
art form such as wayang golek, it can never
leave your heart.

The connection of wayang golek with
mask dance is also illustrated when we are
shown extracts of West Javanese (possibly
Bandung-style) mask dance, in particular the
character of Tumenggung. I only wished I
could see more — but this is also a good
thing.

Obviously wayang golek shows change
with time, for example, these days the singers
always use a PA system. This is a constantly
evolving and living tradition, and perhaps this
is one of the secrets of its vibrancy. Otong
Rasta points out that he cannot predict the
fate of his dalang grandson (and I imagine
the people of Indonesia could be in for a
rough ride for some years yet), but for me his
most memorable words are when he adds
that “the art of the dalang will not disappear,
I’m sure.” Over the centuries this art has
survived and adapted to many invasions of

rulers and religions. Let us hope that it
continues to survive the latest larger-than-life
cultural invasion of Western trends, TV, and
karaoke. Somehow I am inclined to agree
with Otong Rasta — the art of the dalang will
not disappear, I’m sure.

The Puppeteer’s Wayang
Latiff Mohidin
the wayang is over
rawana is dead
no longer the curses and blood
no longer bitterness and lightning
the skies are again at peace

for the hundredth time
rama and sita
live happily
in the chest

now,
puppeteer
you may Sleep soundly
on the shredded
banana trunk

but look
puppeteer,
the audience is still standing
still standing
waiting for rawana to return to life
wailing
for the wayang to begin once more

(Translated by Muhammad Haji Salleh, from The
Puppeteer’s Wayang: A selection of modern
Malaysian poetry, edited and introduced by
Muhammad Haji Salleh, co-publication between In
Print Publishing Ltd and Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka
Malaysia, 1992.)

John Morley has had an interest in Punch since an
early age, and made his “debut” performance at the
age of 10 before some of the UK’s top Punchmen,
including the late Percy Press Senior. at a Guild
meeting in 1972. He started performing Punch in
foreign languages, including Arabic. in 1978 and
became a “semiprofessional” in 1982. He is
presently studying for an MA in Linguistics and
Translation Studies in Arabic and Spanish and is
doing further research into Mr Punch’s cousins in
the Islamic world.

As there is also a distinct lack of material in
English on the Danish side of the family, he offers
the following information.

He would be very pleased to receive further
information on Mester Jakel from readers.

Mester Jakel —the Punch Tradition

in Denmark
John Morley

Of all the various Punch and Judy traditions
in western Europe, the Danish equivalent —
the Mester Jakel Komedie — seems to have
been singularly neglected by historians of the
puppet theatre, particularly in the English-
speaking world. This is somewhat
surprising, as the hero of these glove puppet
shows, Mester Jakel (pronounced “Yah-k!”),
has been in existence since at least the final
decade of the 18th century.

Having felt for some time that an account
of this interesting folk tradition was long
overdue, I recently decided to delve into its
history and evolution by examining Danish-
language material on the subject. Thus much
of the information presented here has been
culled from the excellent research carried out
by Svend Smith and published in his Mester
Jakel (1945)' and from Vi Spiller
Dukketeater (1969).

The origins of Mester Jakel (or Jakel for
short) are somewhat obscure, as is the
derivation of his name. Smith suggests that
“Jakel” may derive from the Low German
diminutive form of Jacob or from Jcikel,

' Mester Jakel - Svend Smith, Nyt Nordisk Forlag
Amold Busck, Copenhagen (1945).

* Vi Spiller Dukketeater — Politikens Forlag,
Copenhagen (1969).

10

meaning “yokel” or “blockhead.”
Alternatively, it may derive from Maitre
Jacques, puppet character popular in
northern France or from the German Meister
Hemmerlein, another puppet character whose
name was used for a “Merry Andrew,”
“hangman” or “fairground entertainer.” As
regards the stock plays he appeared in, these
seem to contain certain elements of the old
German, Austrian and French comic
traditions. :

a

The earliest known pictorial evidence for
Mester Jakel comes from an illustration by
an artist called Stanley, dating from 1795
(when the French Revolution was in full
swing). It shows an exaggeratedly large
booth flying the Danish flag with the emblem
of King Christian VII, surrounded by railings
with an audience largely made up of well-
dressed adults. To one side of the booth
stands a man blowing a trumpet, presumably
to attract the crowds. The stage itself shows
a street scene with three puppet figures
standing near a tub and a cradle. To the
puppeteer’s left stands a Polichinelle-type
figure with pointed cap and pigtail, in the
middle the figure of a man, and to the right
the Devil, with prominent horns. The booth
is an attraction at a fairground on the Kirsten
Piils Kilde, which was once the site of a
sacred spring and a place of pilgrimage in the

Illustration from Mester Jakel by Svend Smith

16th century. This area subsequently became
part of the Dyrehavsbakken (or Bakken for
short), just north of Copenhagen, and this
was to provide the main pitches for Jakel for
almost two hundred years.

It is quite possible that the puppeteer
whose booth was depicted by Stanley was a
Hanoverian called Egesdorff, who may have
been in partnership with a Dane called Jorgen
Quist. It is also possible that Egesdorff was
in competition with another Danish showman
called Francke circa 1794. Should Egesdorff
have been the first to introduce Jakel to
Denmark, then this is worthy of note, as it
was also a German, Hausermann, who is
credited with introducing Kasper to Sweden
in 1856.

We are most fortunate in that Smith
reproduces four of the traditional Jakel plays
in his book, including the earliest extant play,
Madam Roset, which, in all probability, dates
from the 1790s and may have been
performed by Francke. The story itself may
owe something to contemporary southern
Austrian comedy. The version quoted in
Smith was probably written down in about
1840 but the action is difficult to follow at
times because of a lack of appropriate stage-
directions. However, here, for the reader’s
interest, is a brief résumé of the plot:

Scene One. A suitor comes on hoping to
meet Madam Roset, wife of a tavern-keeper.
He calls her and tells her he has come to
propose marriage to her. She replies that she
has no time to talk and asks him to return in
an hour’s time. The suitor turns to the
audience and vows to see her again in half an
hour’s time.

Scene Two. Old Jakel, an elderly
gentleman (who is an apprentice tailor),
comes on and addresses the audience saying
that he has already had five wives and has his
eye on Madam Roset to be his sixth! The
vain, coquettish lady then appears, asking
what his business is. He in turn asks for her
hand in marriage. She replies that she might
consider it but he will have to agree to keep
three promises as part of a contract. Firstly,

11

he will have to get up early, prepare some
coffee and chocolate and bring these to her in
bed. The suitor reappears and promptly
kicks Jakel out as he is determined to have
the lady for himself. Jakel comes on again
and Madam Roset explains the suitor is
simply her outdoor servant.

On inquiring what the second promise is,
Jakel is told that he will have to walk behind
her in the morning carrying a basket to
market. He remarks “God help me — an old
man carrying a basket? I have enough
trouble carrying myself!” She tells him that if
he becomes unwell, she can have him cured,
whereupon the suitor returns proclaiming he
is the lady’s domestic doctor! Once again,
he kicks Jakel out. Jakel becomes suspicious
but Madam Roset explains he is merely her
servant.

The third promise is that he should peep
through his fingers at all the good-looking
visitors who call on her. “So you want me to
be a cuckoid at my old age, do you?” — Jakel
retorts.

Scene Three. The suitor attempts to woo
Roset again. He expresses his love for her
and she in turn asks him to accede to the
same three demands she placed on Jakel.
The suitor is very enthusiastic and she
declares that he can be her husband and that
they can dispense with a priest. They kiss.
The suitor asks her to attend to the cooking
while he attends to the guests but she tells
him to tend the garden as she will take care
of the guests. When he tells her to go, she
refuses and he hits her and kicks her out,
declaring that he wishes to show her who is
now master of the house!

Scene Four. A tavern with Jakel’s son
and the tavern-keeper (Madam Roset’s
husband). Jakel’s son asks for a tankard of
beer. As the landlord is keen to ascertain
whether his customer has enough money on
him, he taps his pocket. It clinks so the
landlord says he will bring a_ beer
immediately. However, the fact is that
Jakel’s son is penniless but he does not want
to let on. Having consumed the beer, he

declares to the landlord that he is penniless
but says that his honest old father will come
the following day to pay him. The landlord
is furious and hits him. Sure enough, the
next day, Old Jakel comes to the tavern
asking why the landlord hit his son. A fight
soon breaks out involving a tankard.

Scene Five. (Presumably the tavern-
keeper’s house). The landlord comes on
saying he is reverting to his old trade, that of
a tailor. He calls his apprentice, Jakel, whom
he addresses as “lad.” Jakel says he is busy
as he has to prepare some coffee for Madam
Roset. The landlord persuades Jakel to
appear and admires him as a “decent
worker.” He asks him to fetch his tailor’s
table and some material to sew. He says
Jakel can be a “master” in two days’ time.
Jakel, however, thinks the landlord is an old
scoundrel. Jakel is promised various rewards
if he sews well. The landlord makes to go
out but Jakel warns him not to get drunk as
he did two days earlier, whereupon his
employer exclaims “Damn you, lad — will you
tell the dear audience about my error?”

He leaves and Madam Roset comes on
and inquires about the coffee. Jakel replies
he has had a problem with the kettle and is
quite firm with her. She soon goes out and
the suitor returns, asking Jakel if he may
have access to Roset but Jakel is non-
committal. Roset reappears and tells the
suitor that she is really married to an honest
old tailor. Of course, she wants to ensure
that her husband does not discover their
affair. They kiss. Jakel is observing this and,
in an aside, tells the audience he will reveal
all when the husband gets home.

The suitor asks Roset what she will tell
her husband when he gets back and she
replies that she will make him believe he is
her brother who has been abroad for fifteen
years and has just returned. At this point, the
husband appears and Roset explains the man
is her “brother.” The husband is quite
surprised but seems to believe her and asks
her to attend to the cooking. Realising Jakel
has not sewn a stitch, he calls his apprentice,

12

who says he is busy preparing a roast for the
lady. The landlord is angry and demands that
he appear. Jakel promptly tells him about
Roset’s lie and explains that the man is her
fiancé. The landlord is furious and goes out.
Roset calls Jakel and asks whether the roast
is ready and tells him to bring it for her
hungry “brother.” The suitor comes on,
Jakel lays the table, and the suitor sits down.
The landlord reappears, still furious, and has
a fight with the suitor. In the confusion
which ensues, Jakel comes on with the roast
and throws it over the suitor’s head!

Here the text ends, somewhat abruptly.
The play was clearly written for an adult
audience and it has, to my mind, some of the
qualities of a European fairy tale and comes
across as a kind of farce, where Jakel is
reminiscent of Pantaloon in the Commedia
dell’ Arte.

The other three playlets seem to be
Danish adaptations of some of the episodes
in the Gernan fairground Kasper repertoire,
which may have been introduced by
Egesdorff.

In The Jew or Old Jakel’s Misfortunes,
Jakel appears once again as an old man, this
time with all the mischievous cunning of the
German folk hero Till Eulenspiegel. A Jew
comes on asking to be paid back money he
lent Jakel and his wife to buy clothes for their
silver wedding anniversary. Jakel borrows
half the amount from a local distiller and the
Jew says he will return the next day for the
rest. Jakel tells his wife not to worry as he
has a plan and asks their servant to clean and
fetch an old coffin in the loft which Jakel has
used before to “play dead” in such
circumstances!

As the servant is cleaning it out, he finds
some old bread crumbs, some mouldy cheese
rinds and a bottle with a small amount of
distilled spirits! When the Jew returns, Jakel
gets his wife to cry and climbs into the coffin
and pretends to be dead. In the end, Jakel
beats the Jew to death and decides to bury
him in the garden. He gets the servant to
help him put the corpse into the coffin and

take it in turns to cry over it (cf our Punch
and Joey). The coffin is carried out to the
chant “Now it’s all right, now it’s all right
again!” The theme of the coffin is
reminiscent of the German Kasper and Dutch
Jan Klaassen, while that of the
moneylending Jew also appears in_ the
Swedish Kasper.

In The Executioner’s Young Assistant or
The Hanging, Old Jakel has a servant,
Kasper, whom he instructs to go out and buy
four horses. As he hands him the money,
Jakel warns him “.... Take care of it or else
I'll take care of your hide when you get
back!” Kasper starts his journey but is
extremely tired and decides to have a nap
and sleep on the money he has just been
given. Along comes a Sorcerer (in later
versions, a Jew) who wishes to swindle
Kasper and steal his money by making him
climb into a sack so that he can “increase”
his money for him! Kasper is persuaded to
do so and the Sorcerer snatches the money
and runs off with it.

Soon Old Jakel comes by and notices the
sack. When he discovers it is Kasper, he
asks where the horses and money are. Jakel
realises what has happened and says Kasper
will hang for his foolishness. The
executioner’s assistant is summoned and
announces “You’re going to hang now!”
whereupon Kasper replies “Oh, good
heavens! Can’t it wait till tomorrow, as I’m
having such a bad time today?” There then
follows the familiar noose routine where
Kasper finally hangs the executioner’s
assistant.

One version finishes as above, while
another continues with Kasper fetching the
Devil to take the body away; yet another has
Kasper saying “The Devil wasn’t home — but
now his nephew’s coming. He’s such a
quick, brisk walker!” (This is presumably a
reference to death.) There is certainly scope
for improvisation here.

In The King of Prussia, an army recruiting
officer, who happens to be the King of
Prussia, comes on looking for likely recruits.

13

He spots Kasper and sounds him out as to
whether he would like to be a soldier. When
Kasper realises he will receive bread and his
pay every fifth day, he agrees to join. The
king intends to show him how to drill
properly and stand in a sentry box. The
dialogue is quite fast-moving, with several
weak puns and silly reactions on the part of
Kasper, eg:

King: Look, Kasper — here you have a
gun. You take it like this, on your shoulder
and you go here — up and down, up and
down.

Kasper: Like this? (He jumps up and
down.)

In the end, Kasper kills the king and then
notices a black shape descending. First he
thinks it could be a blacksmith, then a
chimney sweep — but he soon realises it is
none other than Old Nick! They soon fight
and the Devil disappears. Kasper goes back
to his sentry box to wait for his sweetheart
Mette (or “cupboard lover,” as he calls her).
She promptly comes on with a delicious
black pudding for him. He kisses Mette and
she leaves. Then a monster, the dog Delle,
comes up, having smelt the sausage. The
dog grabs the sausage and runs off with it. It
then reappears and devours the corpse of the
soldier king!

Once again, we have quite an abrupt
ending here. The character of the soldier
king may be based on Frederik Wilhelm 1,
King of Prussia (1713-40), who represented
the tough, tyrannical Junker or German army
officer. The drilling scene can be found in
the German Kasper, the Dutch Jan Klaassen
and the Russian Petrushka, while the
monster dog is equivalent to the Barbos in
Petrushka and the dog in the Italian
Pulcinella.

We cannot be certain exactly what Mester
Jakel looked like initially, but by the mid-
19th century, he had a dark red floppy cap,
often with a tassel, fair hair, and a long, dark
jacket worn over a wide-sleeved shirt, with
buttons down his waistcoat — a costume he

continued to wear until
the 1930s. He often
wielded a stick and was
portrayed as either a
young or old man, who
could be both wily and

argumentative.

The puppets were
/A\ usually carved of wood

and the plays were

passed from one player
to another, apparently in oral form. From
the very outset, puppeteers had to obtain
licences from the Royal Chancellery in
Copenhagen in order to perform. These lists
provide evidence of an almost unbroken
chain of performers at the Dyrehavsbakken.
Among the most famous players were Johan
Adam Datz, who performed Jakel for 35
years, from 1843 to 1878. By 1863 he had
set up a permanent, wooden booth — a
tradition which has continued almost up to
the present day.

In 1878, Datz’s apprentice, dubbed
“Jakel” Jensen took over, using puppets
carved by C Salomonsen. A spell in prison
from 1888-9 put an end to Jensen’s puppet
activities. During his time, the dog puppet
was called “Klipfisken” (literally, “dried
cod”!).

By the turn of the century, at a time when
‘the Punch show had reached the height of its
popularity in numerous countries, the show
was being performed by Sofie and Martin
Petersen, the resident strongman at Bakken.
Martin died in 1903 and Sofie subsequently
married Charles Schenstrom, a drummer and
marionette-player who was also the son of
Bakken’s old tightrope walker and acrobat.
He performed with a certain Spangenberg,
who had been Martin Petersen’s stand-in,
until 1931, and called his dog puppet Delle
(literally, “roll of fat”!). In the winter
months, Schenstrgm appeared in private
homes, as did his predecessors. It may safely
be said that the old-style plays came to a halt
when Schenstram gave up performing in
(93:1.

Illustration from The Puppetmaster, Sept 1962

14

The decline in the popularity of Mester
Jakel seems to set in shortly after this time,
although puppet theatres — such as that of
Helgo Jargensen with its stylized rod puppets
— continued to be active in Copenhagen
throughout the thirties.

By the 1960s, a truly remarkable and quite
inexplicable metamorphosis had taken place,
whereby Mester Jakel had been transformed
into a tall comic jester, with a slightly hooked
nose and chin, legs (but no hump), wearing
red and green motley and matching cap with
two bell-capped horns. This may have been
due to the ever-present influence of the
German Kasper, particularly the standard
image of him created by Max Jacob. Jakel’s
character mellowed somewhat and the plays
he appeared in were geared for quite a
different audience, namely younger children.

Two modern (1960s?) plays are given in
Vi Spiller Dukketeater which amply
demonstrate this change. The first is entitled
Mester Jakel the Baker by Jytte Abildstram
and involves a young Jakel and his wife
baking French bread in their kitchen — even
the cat gets thrown into the dough mixture!
When the dough rises, it turns on Jakel and
punches him. Jakel is frightened of it and
wants to throw it out. He devises a game
whereby they must keep silent. The first
person to utter a word has to throw it out.
No sooner have they begun then a “Sly
Fellow” knocks at the door wanting to know
how to get to town. Naturally, he receives
no reply and thinks Jakel and his wife must
be daft. The “Sly Fellow” then tries to steal
a string of sausages from the wall, but Jakel
throws the dough at him and he tumbles out
of the door, dropping the string of sausages,
much to the delight of Jakel and his wife.

In Mester Jakel and the Sausage Man
(performed at Legoland’s children’s theatre),
Mester Jakel is passing a hot-dog stand one
day and is enticed by the smell of the
sausages cooking. He decides to order one
but, unbeknown to him and the vendor, a
dog jumps up and snatches the sausage from
the counter. This happens several times with

the vendor becoming steadily more
exasperated with Jakel. Eventually, the
vendor says he is going to fetch some more
sausages and puts Jakel in charge of the stall.
Soon a customer, “Ole Fraek,” appears and
plays a trick on Jakel. Jakel then notices the
dog and realizes what has been happening.
When the vendor returns, he tries to
convince him about the dog. The dog jumps
up again and seizes the vendor by the nose.
“Get rid of it!” — he screams. “Do I get my
sausage, then?” — asks Jakel. “You can have
as many as you like, if you’ll only get rid of
it!” Jakel chases the dog out and asks for
two sausages with onions and ketchup as his
reward and goes out jubilantly.

In both short plays, there is ample scope
for plenty of slapstick and audience
participation, as opposed to the more
traditional plays, which audiences would
probably have viewed as passive spectacles.
By the end of the 1960s, some of the old
puppets were to be found in_ the
Nationalmuseet and Teaterhistorisk Museum
in Copenhagen.

Unlike many of his foreign cousins,
Mester Jakel does not appear to have been
“swazzled,” although there is, apparently, a
Danish term for “swazzle” (namely
tungeflojte), which may in turn simply be a
direct translation of the German
Zungenpfeife (literally, “tongue-whistle”).

By the early 1980s there was an artist
called Hilsen Fra performing in his cottage-
like theatre at Bakken a version of Jakel not
unlike our Punch and Judy, complete with
baby, ghost and hangman. His Jakel was the
jester-type figure, while the wife (who seems
to be unnamed in Denmark) wore a white
mob-cap, spotted dress and white apron like
our Judy. As well as Jakel, Hilsen Fra
performed as Pierrot and did conjuring as
well as general clowning. Sadly, he seems to
have been one of the last exponents of the
old-style Jakel shows.

Although the tradition appears to have
died out in Denmark, the name Jakel is still
well-known and was the title used for the

15

Danish version of Harrison Birtwistle’s
avant-garde opera Punch and Judy (1966-7)
when it was premiered in Copenhagen in
1981.

It is to be hoped that someone will soon
revive this venerable tradition in Denmark,
even if it is deemed necessary to render it
more “politically correct,” so that old Mester
Jakel can be taken laughing and singing into
the 21st century.

(Many thanks to Ray DaSilva, “Prof”
John Styles, and Lilo Skaarup for the
information and material they have been able
to provide.)

Henrik Kemény and Vitéz Laszlo:
Words, Words, Words

“At dawn the police, army, and secret police
surrounded the Liget, and there were so
many of them that they blocked off the whole
fairground. Then they drew up a list of
everything they found. We had to leave the
Liget and my mother... poor thing, she had
given up her whole life for this. She and my
father built the booth with their own bare
hands. She said she’d never leave there,
she'd rather die there.... I’m sorry, no, no,
no.... I don’t want to speak about that.”
This was puppetmaster Henrik Kemény’s
very brief, tearful appearance in a
programme called “Big War in Lilliput”
(broadcast on Channel 4, in November
1997), which tells the seriocomic story of an
attempt to reopen the world-famous Lilliput
Theatre of dwarves, which had been closed
down by the Communists in 1949, along with
the rest of Budapest’s main popular
amusement park, on the grounds that it was
“bourgeois.”

“There seems to be little material on this
outside of Hungarian,” I wrote apropos of
Vitéz Laszlo (Bulletin, July 1996), “I should
like therefore to return to this subject when |
am better informed.” However, even with
the above reminder of the artist who had so
enthused me (and John Phillips) with his
bravura performance at the UNIMA Festival

in Budapest, I was unable — for the usual
reason of lack of time — to do so. However,
I hope I am able (with more than a little help
from my friends) to make honourable amends
at this late date.

I shall add just a little more factual
historical and biographical information about
Henrik Kemény and Vitéz Laszlé than in my
original article, but, essentially, I decided to
take a linguistic turn, inspired by the
comment (p 187) in McCormick and
Pratasik’s Popular puppet theatre in Europe,
1800-1914 (PPTE) that “Infectious punning
is also very common with Hungary’s Vitéz
Laszl6, who gets into hopeless linguistic
misunderstanding, as, for example, when he
confuses ‘malom’ (mill) and
‘majom’(monkey).”

PPTE (p 123) also neatly sums up the
glove-puppet’s origins: “A comparative late-
comer as a new puppet character was Vitéz
Laszlo, created by Karoly Hincz in Budapest
in 1905, in response to the upsurge of
Magyarism. A conglomerate of Paprika
Jancsi, Kasper of the Vienna Prater, and a
new heroic type, Vitéz Laszlo,” took his

” Vitéz (a Slav borrowing) means valiant, gallant:

soldier, knight. There is another national figure, for
example, called Janos Vitéz “John the Hero.” Laszlo
is a common name like John or Jack. Kemény’s own

Illustration by John Blundall

16

name from a play which had been a rallying

point for Hungarian nationalism and
consequently banned after the 1948-9
revolution.” Hetty Paérl, whom I met by

chance for the first time at a Kemény
performance in Budapest, in the chapter she
devotes to Vitéz Laszlo in her book
Heerekrintjes reports that he appeared in
folk puppet shows much earlier but adds,
significantly, “though it is uncertain whether
these reports are to be believed.”

The two most important dynasties in
Hungarian puppet theatre, both of which had
travelling origins in the 19th century and
settled in Budapest, are the Hincz and
Korngut-Kemény _ families. Salomon
Korngut and his son Henrik Korngut-
Kemény set up their theatre in Budapest in
the early part of this century, and Vitéz
Laszl6 also became part of their repertoire.
In fact, it was the Kemény family (into which
the present Henrik Kemény was born on 29
January 1925) which was really to develop
the character.

The capital had various parks where
puppeteers staged their shows. Kemény’s
theatre had a working-class locale and
audience, where the folk hero was in his
element: “.,.the road to the Varosliget (City
Park) went through the areas inhabited by
civil servants, past barracks, and the slum
districts on the outskirts.. Between the two
world wars the Varosliget became the place
where the poor went for their entertainment
— and to go on strike.” (from the 11l-page
summary Wanderpuppenspiel und
Kiinstlerisches Puppentheater in Ungarn bis
zum Jahre 19-45 to Belitska-Scholz Hedvig’s
Vasari és Miivészi Babjatszas
Magyarorszdgon 1945-IG, Tihany, 1974.
The Varosliget, which was laid out in 1798,
and stands at the top of Budapest’s longest
avenue, Andrassy ut, still has an amusement
park). The performances of knockabout
farce at Kemény’s theatre placed a premium

name is two syllables, the “ny” is a single, soft sound
as in English “canyon.”

on rapid execution and they were technically
brilliant. Hincz’s theatre was in a much more
refined part of the city and the audience was
middle class.

Readers will be very familiar with
wordplay in popular theatre — Punch being
our grand puppet exemplar of linguistic
exuberance. However, even he must, I think,
accord primacy in this domain to Vitéz
Laszlé, in full flow — and Kemény’s whole
performance is delivered at lightning speed.

I believe the examples given (which come
from four performances on two commercial
videos of Kemény, which include some non-
Vitéz Laszlé routines) are sufficiently clear
to enable readers to appreciate the profuse
verbal playfulness and the “mechanics” of it
even if they are not able to assign the correct
phonetic value to the Hungarian sounds.

1. Adding bits to words in nonsensical or
diminutizing way:

a kutyikafajat (kutyafajat) = drat
nagymamucika (nagymama) = granny
nadigrad (nadrag) = trousers

cipellé (cipd) = shoes

sapika (sapka) = hat

szaomjatos (szomjas) = thirsty

kilulcsluk (kulcsluk) = keyhole

pofontot (pofont) kapsz = you'll get a clip
round the ear

ellopikalta (ellopta) = he stole it
dlmitos (almos) = sleepy

mutitasd (mutasd) meg magadat =
yourself

Molinari (molnar) bacsi = Mr Miller
gabonydkokat (gabonazsdkokat) = sacks of
grain

becsukikalja (becsukja) = he shuts it
pofontot (pofont) = clip, slap

éhetes es szomjatos (éhes es szomjas) =
hungry and thirsty

raérkezem (raérek) = Vve got time

show

2. _Different_but similar sounding words
sed:

mdngorolni (to mangle) for vandorolni (to
wander)

17

a hércségdk nem akarjak megenni az
uzsonnat (the hamsters don’t want to eat
their tea) for az drdégék nem engedik
megorélni a gabondt (the devils won’t let us
grind the grain)

1. Pluto!

2. Gyujtd? = lighter? (burner)

bért ragok ( I’m chewing skin) for drt dllok
(I’m standing guard)

1. En vagyok a Lucifer! (Vm Lucifer)

2. Cuclifer? (cucli = dummy for babies)

kezét csukadlom (kezét csdkolom = polite
greeting, literally, I kiss your hand/csdkolni;
here it is a csuka pike (fish) that is being
kissed.)

makolni (mak = poppyseed) for zsdkolni (to
put in sacks)

ahol a nincs van (where the nothing is) for
ahol a kines van (where the treasure is)
kilincs (lock) for kincs (treasure)

bolond (mad) for boldog (happy)

gédor (pit) for védér (bucket)

1. szcimiiz6tt remete (exiled hermit)

2. fekete feneke? = (black bottom?)

1. sok a munka (there’s a lot of work)

2. sok a sonka? (much ham?)

1. alapja van (it has a basis)

2. kalapja van? (it has/you have a hat?)
kalimpdalnak (swinging their legs/wobble) for
kolompolnak (ringing bells)

Jo reggelit kivanok (enjoy your breakfast) for
jo reggelt kivanok (good morning)

kacsoit (small hands) for kacsdit (your
ducks)

3. Puns:

Q: akarsz valami jo pénzt keresni? (do you
want to earn some good money?)

A: én mar olyan sokszor kerestem de
sohasem taldliam (Vve looked so often but
never found any); keresni = to earn or to
look for

1. Egy jot a fejemre titdttél (you gave me a
good whack on the head)

2. Jo volt? (was it good — here’s another)

4. Nonsense:
egy fél kilo sort, a habot alul (half a kilo of
beer, with the froth at the bottom)

maja holnaputan ha megint éhes leszek,
vagy tegnapelétt reggel tiz orakor vagy
délbe este uzsonnara meg fogom vacsorazni
(the day after tomorrow, if I’m hungry again,
or the day before yesterday morning at ten or
at midday in the evening I’ll dine on it for my
tea)

majdnem eltérte a hajamat = he almost
broke my hair

egy zsak pulyka — hurka — buza— sparga —
arpa = a sack of turkeys — sausages — wheat
—string — barley

térdigéro huzat = a draught up to your knees
tele van tirességgel (it’s full of nothing)
almafabol — barack— szilva — dinnye (apple
tree — peach — plum — melon)

5. Pronounciation:

1. Mit tetté1? = what have you done?

2. Mit ettél te? = What have YOU eaten?

1. Kelj fel! = get up!

2. Neki mar nem kell tejfel! = he doesn’t
need sour cream any more!

nehéz (nehez) = heavy

énekolni (énekelni) = to sing

However, it is the integration of the
different components of the performance that
is crucial. To quote PP7E again (p 154),
and I can bear witness to the truth of the
observation: “Today Henrik Kemény, in
Budapest, can hold an audience for a good
twenty minutes with only two puppets, Vitéz
Laszl6 and a devil. He runs through all the
variations of the physical and fight routines,
but it is the interplay between these and the
verbal element that actually holds the
attention. Timing, pacing and rhythm are all
factors that affect both voice and physical
movement. They work subliminally on
audiences and sustain scenes whose only
narrative element is a fight which one of the
protagonists will win.” Hetty Paérl also
writes: “I can confirm that Kemény’s
performance was among the most skilful,
exciting, and inspiring puppets shows that I
have ever seen.” (Her longish description of
Kemény’s performance of the classic piece

“Vitéz Laszlé and the Devil’s Mill,” at the
18

UNIMA festival in Dresden in 1984, is
available, along with the rest of the chapter,
in translation from the Dutch on request.)

I have mentioned Punch and there is a
pleasing Anglo-Magyar connection here.
Thanks to Glyn Edwards and Penny Francis,
working through the agency of the Puppet
Centre, Kemény was invited over for the
“325 Celebrations” in 1987, where he was a
smash hit. Glyn tells me Kemény is
“revered” by all the Punch performers who
have played alongside him and that when he
worked with him a few years ago in Naples
Kemény told him that the visit to London
had led to all manner of subsequent foreign
visits. Glyn also described a rather vinous
lunch in Italy during which Henrik “as is his
wont, turned everything in sight — from the
paper napkins to the fruit in the fruit bowl —
into a puppet of some sort.” He is delighted
that it was “Mr Punch, however
inadvertently, who caused the Kemény show
to set off on its international career. He is an
international treasure in the ‘Punch and
relations genre’ if ever there was one.”
Which seems a very good note on which to

_ sign off on this UNIMA Member of Honour.

PS: This article could not have been written
without the help of friends Brigitte Neifer
(German), John Pelling (German and Dutch),

- and Edith Adler (Hungarian), the majority of

whose considerable labour is not, however,
except for Edith’s, evident here. My
heartfelt thanks to them.

Small Talk

John Furse

The Smallest of All Persons mentioned in the
Records of Littleness by Gaby Wood (Profile
Books, £3.99) is little more than a pamphlet.
Minute in format — barely postcard size and a
mere 88 pages — it tells the tale of the doll-
like “Sicilian Fairy,” Caroline Crachami.
Twenty-one inches tall, the eight-year-old hit
the headlines in 1824, when she was
exhibited in Bond Street — entrance one
shilling, another shilling for a _ touch.

According to The Times, she was
“unquestionably the most curious of all the
dwarfish candidates for public favour that
have visited the metropolis,” though comic
actor and freak-show fan Charles Mathews
found her “a most disgusting little withered
creature,” and clearly Gaby Wood’s task has
been to deconstruct the myth and to set the
“fairy” tale within a strict social and
historical context. As one might expect, not
all that was claimed was fact, but the
voyeuristic and scientific interest she stirred
in the Victorian imagination was
considerable, and this is reason enough to
recommend it as a “good read.” The
publishers tell us that: “Gaby Wood
brilliantly re-creates the milieu of Victorian
side-shows and macabre interests in this little
book that far exceeds its own stature,” and I
would not quarrel with that. For the
currently curious, Caroline Crachami’s
skeleton stands next to that of the 7ft 10in
Charles Byrne, “The Irish Giant,” in the
Hunterian Collection, in London.

Nor far from freak, the all-American
Barbie Doll is commemorated in Barbie:
Four Decades of Fashion, Fantasy and Fun
by the Italian doll expert and lecturer at the
Venice Academy of Fine Arts Marco Tosa
(Pavilion, £14.99) and is seen as the first
comprehensive biography of Barbie.
“Hundreds of full (lurid) colour photographs
detail her origins, history and _ physical
evolution. Barbie is a witty and nicely
produced book on a girl who is undoubtedly
a major cultural icon — a doll with an outfit —
many outfits — and image to suit the fantasy
of children and adults worldwide.” Reviewer
Laurence Phelan notes that “From the dawn
of time, dolls have been the silent allies of
children at play — passive and docile, the doll
is simultaneously exalted and condemned, the
target of the adult world’s sweeping passions
that range from unmitigated hatred to the
most tender love.” Barbie is beautiful,
Barbie is ....!

19

Coincidentally, Hilary Mantel recently published a
novel The Giant O’Brien, O’Brien being the stage
name of Charles Byrne, who, as John Furse
mentions, towers over the manikin Caroline
Crachami in the museum named after the 18"-
century anatomist John Hunter.
Théatres de Papier, Troyes
Charles Broughton

Last December the mediaeval French City of
Troyes held a Paper Theatre Festival.
Hosted and organized by Alain Lecucgq, it
attracted practitioners and enthusiasts from
across Europe, encouraging them to display
their diverse theatrical creations as well as
having a good time amongst the cobbles and
timbers of this old city.

No paper theatre festival would be
complete without the presence of Mr George
Speaight (and his wife, Mary), whose
research into tracing the history and
evolution of Toy Theatre is now regarded by
many as being a definitive body of work.
And indeed he was the guest of honour at
Troyes.

The venue was a community hall just off
the Cathedral square. An exhibition of Toy
Theatres from around the world filled the
foyer and the upper gallery.

Alain Lecucq opened the festival by
presenting George with a large silver medal.
He explained the importance of George’s
research work in the context of the
blossoming interest now being shown in toy
theatre productions. The flashbulbs popped
and George, clearly delighted, thanked his
hosts in an impromptu speech in slightly
faltering but heartfelt French. And then the
Festival began with, fittingly enough,
George’s production of The Miller And His
Men. 1 had never seen this show and was
looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I still
haven’t seen it.

The problem was the venue. It was too
big for Paper Theatre. It seated up to a
hundred, and if it was full and you were any
further back than Row 7 or 8 you couldn’t
see the tiny stages unless they were raised up
high. Sightlines were a problem with
George’s show and also with Dirk Reimers’

Pollidor Papiertheater. Both of these stages
were set up on tables, and because the
auditorium lacked a steep rake, much of the
intimacy that is a vital ingredient of Toy
Theatre was lost. Having said that, these
two showmen are such vibrant and
entertaining performers that it went some
way toward alleviating the pain of not being
able to see.

George’s rousing finale, accompanied by
the appropriate sound effects of a hammer
hitting a tin tray as the mill blows up,
produced prolonged applause. He had been
feeling unwell earlier in the day and there had
been some concern that he wouldn’t be able
to perform, but he rallied and, ably supported
by Mary, gave a performance that was
nothing less than a triumph.

Invisius, a German company, presented
The Fisherman And His Wife. The two
operators, Dorett and Riidiger Koch,
concealed behind their theatre, which had
been screened off so that the audience
focused on the small proscenium opening,

performed their piece to a_ recorded
soundtrack. The tale of a bullying wife
demanding ever more opulent

homes from the magic fish that her
husband has saved from the dinner
table was told slowly and
methodically, gradually building to
its climax when the wife’s final
demand to become God is refused
and the Fish strips away her
luxurious homes and returns her to
the hovel, or in this production the
piss pot, from which she started.
The husband’s repetitive journey
from the sea to the shore and the
appearance of each new and ever grander
house was achieved with an _ almost
mechanical smoothness, which, 1 later
discovered, actually was the case, as the
stage had been built onto a revolve almost
three feet in circumference surrounded by a
cyclorama. Changes of scale and depth, the
sets and figures painted in inks and
watercolours, coupled with subtle lighting

Professor Van Helsing and Dracula by Joe Gladwin 20

20

changes produced hypnotic stage pictures.
Then, at the midnight hour, the lights
suddenly went out. The audience waited in
the dark.

From across the
auditorium a pair of
henchmen bearing

}
/
flickering candelabras ~~ ]
silently | approached “A

and ushered us into (yy
our seats. They blew

out their tiny flames.
Dracula had risen.

Joe Gladwin
(Paperplays Theatre)
has been performing
this show for about two years. Where others
work at a slow and even pace, presenting
their shows with careful precision, allowing
every element to shine through and have its
moment of glory, Joe throws everything
together, mixing up a rich concoction of
countless scene changes, hundreds of lighting
cues and a cornucopia of character voices
which he then hurls at his audience and lets
them take from it what they will. The result
is a visual and aural feast. This is a
glorious romp through Bram
Stoker’s Gothic tale, and although
some of the audience may not have
understood the British seaside
humour of the script, the intricate
sets and special effects kept the tale
rolling along. The ride to the
Borgo Pass — the ship’s passage
across a stormy sea — Dracula’s
castle crumbling to dust — exciting
and engrossing moments, all the
more extraordinary when you
remember that the sets are no bigger than a
shoebox.

So, at half past one, we emerged bleary
eyed into the night. Directly opposite the
theatre was a late-night bar. Fatal to an old
lush like me.

The following morning we met in the
Bibliotheque Municipale de Troyes. A vast
room had been set aside for us, holding, we .

were told, some 47,000 books. I was a little
late arriving and George had already started
his talk on his lifetime’s research into the
history of Toy Theatre. Demonstrating the
diverse styles of theatre sheets from many
different countries, he handed round a large
selection of sheets and playtexts which he
had brought from home. He talked of his
early days working in an Oxford Street
bookshop, where he performed his shows in
a back room, encouraging the customers to
purchase Toy Theatres before they left.

Throughout the festival there was much
discussion as to how to perform Toy
Theatre. Should the showman be seen or
hidden? Should it always be live voice? The
festival had a wide selection of shows
performed in a variety of styles. It seemed
clear and maybe obvious that each show had
its own particular style because that was how
the showman wanted it performed, but then,
if that meant that he was hidden or the show
taped, did it qualify as Toy Theatre?
Watching the showman, it was argued, is as
important as watching the spectacle onstage.
It also means that the audience can see what
is going on — they are in on the act. But,
then, screening off the theatre heightens the
sense of anticipation. It is mysterious,
focusing the audience’s attention on to the
stage, dazzling them with spectacle and
ingenuity, making them absorb what is
happening, not how it is achieved.

The taped shows were certainly
professional and smooth, but they did lack
spontaneity, and when the operator was
hidden and the curtain came down for a
scene change, there wasn’t much to look at.
Enjoying a Toy Theatre show includes
enjoying all the different elements that go
into its presentation. It becomes a very
personal viewpoint.

Dirk Reimers’ Pollidor Papiertheater,
from Germany, confirmed the importance of
the Toy Theatre showman. “I have forgotten
to bring along my music box. [ am sorry.” —
he began. “So in between the scene changes
I shall sing a song and if you know it then do

21

please join in.” This disarming approach,
whether deliberate or not, worked like a
charm. Standing beside his theatre, he
pushed on the figures and left them standing
on stage. He then acted out the plot,
performing all the action and emotion his
characters were experiencing. His
performance was in perfect harmony with the
scale of his theatre, displaying a complete
understanding of how the appeal of Toy
Theatre can be achieved simply and
effectively. Acres of dialogue can swamp
these tiny figures. Their only movement is a
repetitive backwards and forwards motion
showing which character is speaking. They
cannot convey emotions the way puppets
can, and yet, by relating in turn — first to the
audience, and then to his theatre — Dirk
achieved a perfect balance between his
performance and the spectacle onstage. Toy
Theatre isn’t a theatre of miniature actors,
nor is it puppet theatre, it is more of a hybrid
of the two relying for much of its success on
its charm. Its apparent simplicity coupled
with a very individual approach certainly
broadens its appeal and makes for great
entertainment.

Papilu, from Slovenia, perform shows for
infants. Concealed behind a booth, the
husband and wife team of Brane and Maja
Solce presented a traditional puppet show
with cut-out paper characters. They had put
together a compilation of scenes from their
repertoire. It all involved a lot of dancing,
and all on the beat. The characters danced,
mushrooms danced, tables and chairs danced;
in fact if it moved then it danced and
occasionally emitted strange sounds which
presumably. babies can understand.
Everything was taped, nothing went on for
too long and it was all very colourful. But
relentless. Even babies need breathers. The
midnight hour struck once more and Dracula
rose again from his dusty coffin.

The following morning a Grand Auction
was held in the bar from which some of us
had left just a few short hours before.
Nervously smoked cigarettes cast a heavy
pall in the room, a blue haze through which

the collectors attempted to outbid each
other. “These are my little moments of
heaven” enthused one collector afterwards as
he showed me his acquisitions. “I am in
paradise. They will give me the purest
pleasure.” There were over 150 lots. The
highest bid was 800 francs (about £80) for a
single sheet showing a decorated proscenium
arch with red drapes. Apparently a rare item,
and keenly contested. A unique chance to
acquire an authentic piece of Toy Theatre
history. The final performance of the
Festival was Genoveva by Theater Taptoe,
from Belgium. Up till now we had grown
used to seeing individual performers lifting
out their theatres from battered suitcases and
unwrapping their sets and figures from old
towels and blankets tied up with string.
Theater Taptoe arrived in a large white
truck crammed full of scenery. A company
of six, four performers and two stagehands,
proceeded to transform the theatre into a
Victorian Parlour, complete with an upright
piano, chandeliers, marble columns, a chaise

longue, and silken drapes. But no Toy
Theatre.
Costumed in Victorian attire, the

company greeted us at the door and showed
us to our seats. I was very fortunate in being
placed at a small table in the front complete
with a bottle of red wine and a glass. More
drink.... Oh dear.... Oh well... Each of the
cast took on the individual role of a member
of an upper-class Victorian household. The
master of the house would be reciting the
piece and playing the villain. His wife would
accompany the action on the piano and sing
the songs, and his son and the servant would
perform the show.

At that moment the theatre was lifted up
from the back and placed on top of the
piano. No problems with sightlines this time.
Genoveva contains all the elements essential
to a rousing melodrama: passionate love,
wicked betrayal, hopeless despair, filial
devotion, and final absolution. The show’s
highlight was a huge battle between the
Crusaders and the Saracens which evoked in

22

gory detail all of the horror involved with
such contests. Knights were decapitated,
stomachs torn open, limbs severed, bodies
split in two plus numerous impalements. The
stage was soon piled high with paper
corpses. Achieving such ingenious stage
trickery exploited this company’s comic
talents to the full. Clearly relishing their
roles, the four actors played to the gallery,
sweeping the audience along with their
passion and enthusiasm. At the finale
Genoveva’s spirit rose heavenward lit by a
single tiny candle.

The Paper Theatre Festival is held in
Troyes every two years and I know it is
Alain Lecucq’s wish that next time it be held
at a different time of year. Two weeks
before Christmas isn’t ideal for many people.
My wish is that it should be held in a more
suitable venue.

Throughout this article I have used the
terms Toy Theatre and Paper Theatre. They
mean the same thing. Sometimes you will
hear it called New Model Theatre. I have
also stuck to the word “showman.” This is
not being sexist: I have yet to see a woman
Toy Theatre performer. Indeed this formed.
part of a lively debate and George pointed
out that in the Victorian heyday of Toy
Theatre production they were marketed as
toys for the boys and this trend has persisted
to the present day. Alain organised all our
hotels and restaurants and he and his team
made everyone feel thoroughly welcome. He
hopes to perform his show in London and
Norwich some time this year. You will find
no greater champion or passionate advocate
of the joys of Toy Theatre production.

Cose italiane
The autumn colours in Paris were Italian in
hue, with Giambattista Tiepolo and Lorenzo
Lotto at the Petit Palais and Grand Palais and
Tintoretto at the 5th District Mairie. It is
well known that both Giambattista Tiepolo
and his son, Giandomenico, were attracted
by Pulcinella (see John Blundall’s article in
Bulletin No 93). The Tiepolo exhibition (22

October 1998 — 24 January 1999) included
his “La Cuisine de Polichinelle,” which is not,
I imagine, a canvas unfamiliar to puppeteers
— at least in reproduction. Executed between
1765 and 1770, the medium-sized oil (1.04m
by 1.65m), shows a group of Pulcinellas —
humps, white suits, tall hats, and half+masks
— standing or sitting in a relaxed manner
around a steaming pot. On the last Friday of
the carnival in Venice it was the custom for
Pulcinellas to prepare gnocchi (dumplings)
for passers-by. However, it was the first
time I realized that this painting was a British
resident. Leeds Castle (open throughout the
year) tells me that the painting should be
back in the Yellow Drawing Room there by
the time you read this piece. So when next
in Maidstone, Kent....

Pulcinella also appears in the mysterious
Scherzi di Fantasia engravings. What is the
creature in the foreground of “The Discovery
of Pulcinella’s Tomb”?

The Théatre du Rond Point (Champs-
Elysée) will be presenting a commedia
dell’arte programme 2-26 June, which will
include a Pulcinella taken from a Roberto
Rossellini film, directed by Maurizio
Scaparro, with 18'-century Neapolitan
music.

It is no disrespect to local puppeteers that
you do not go to Florence primarily to see
puppetry. However, it was my intention in
February to visit Pupi di Stac (who were at
Charleville in 1994 and 1997) and see one of
their traditional Tuscan glove-puppet plays.
However, lack of a sense of direction and an
adequate map denied me the realization of
this at the end of a long walk. The theatre is
on the outskirts of the city, at No 8 via
Madonna delle Grazie. Take a taxi, bus, or -
better still -ring beforehand (55 697662).

All I can think of to make up for the lack
of a report is to quote a vignette by a
distinguished early 19"-century visitor to the
city on the Arno, Stendhal (Henri Beyle).

“Stendhal’s jeweller friend [Nathan, from
the Ponte Vecchio] later introduced him ‘into
23

the society of a group of wealthy merchants
and their wives’, so that he could watch a
marionette show. Measuring no more than
five feet across, the theatre was an exact
copy of La Scala in Milano.

‘There were tiny lamps proportionate to
all the rest, and each change of set was
carried out rapidly... I can conceive nothing
more enchanting. A company of four-and-
twenty marionettes, each eight inches tall,
equipped with leaden legs and costing a
sequin apiece, performed a delicious, if
somewhat indelicate, comedy which proved
to be an abridged version of Machiavelli’s La
Mandragola. Subsequently, these same
marionettes proceeded to dance a miniature
ballet, with considerable style and elegance.”
(from Francis King’s Florence: A Literary
Companion, John Murray). Out of curiosity,
I looked at Didier Plassard’s wide-ranging
anthology of writing on puppetry Les Mains
de lumiére (Institut International de la
Marionnette, Charleville-Méziéres, 1996) to
see whether it included Stendhal. It does —
from the same source — although the pages
cited are devoted to the satirical antics of
fantoccini in Rome.

I had chosen my hotel, the Hermitage,
because it overlooked the Ponte Vecchio,
flanked now, as then, with jewellers’ shops.
Stendhal, however, lodged at the Hotel Porta
Rossa, about 300 metres away, close to the
Ponte Santa Trinita, I stayed there too on a
previous trip and can recommend the hotel,
which dates back to 1386, as a place of
character.

In the last issue I mentioned the 17"-
century Sicilian wax modeller Gaetano
Zumbo, in particular, his “Plague Waxes.”
These small-scale scenes — virtually the
whole of his extant work — are housed in
Florence’s Museo Zoologico “La Specola”
as part of a fascinating if morbid collection of
1,400 extremely realistic wax pieces from the
18th and 19th centuries designed as a means
of teaching anatomy without directly
observing a corpse.

24

Czech Republic

A reminder that the Guild is very
enterprisingly looking into the possibility of
an eight-day trip to Prague, to take in the 3rd
International Puppet Festival, 1-7 June.
Hotel (b&b), flights, airport transfers and
insurance look like coming to about £340 per
person — which is very reasonable indeed.
Please contact asap Steve Clarke, 12 Hillbarn
Lane, Worthing, West Sussex BN14 9QB
(tel 01903 206854).

There is a web page (http://uts.cc.utexas.
edu/divadlo/indexs&h.html) devoted to
Skupa’s Theatre of Spejbl & Hurvinek. It
has been’ created by
researcher Amy Drizhal,
who is collecting information
for a thesis which concerns
the history of the theatre,
‘and she is looking for
personal reflections. If you
have a reminiscence or a
story through having seen
the company (Skupa himself
made a couple of post-war
visits here, I know), you can
contact her via email from
the site or at the University
of Texas, Austin College of
Fine Arts, Dept of Theatre and Dance.

Your editor would be grateful to any kind
soul who could supply him with slides of
Czech puppetry and/or Czech puppet(s) for a
talk towards the end of June. Postage and
insurance would, of course, be taken in
hand.

Belgium
Four pages of our Belgian colleagues’ annual
review are given over to Edmond Debouny’s
amusing, bemused write-up of last year’s
Belgo-British Festival (“Un chaleureux
jumelage au pays de l’étrange! (Mai 1998)”,
I was pleased to hear from Georges Vetters
that his boisterous tchantchés show at The
Little Angel was seen by someone who told
someone who has invited Georges to

perform at the Seattle Puppet Festival this
August, which should, incidentally, also have
a good British representation.

Readers will be familiar with the
Beresfords’ link with Belgium. I have just
been apprised of an article by Marc Jacobs
detailing this which appeared in the Oost-
Vlaamse Zanten LXXJI_ 1997-2. The
original article and/or translation “Puppet
Making in Flanders in the Nineties: The
contribution of Ted and Kath Beresford” is
available on request.

An informative piece by Clare Thomson
on the Gille tradition in Binche, Wallonia,
appeared in The Independent, 6 2 99. The
Carnival and Mask Museum there (10 Rue
Saint-Moustier; tel 0032 64 335741) is said
to have the largest collection of masks in the
world.

Follow-Ups
I have received the programme of last
November’s Karag6z festival in Bursa, which
is an annual event. A photocopy of it is
available on request.

A short obituary of Li Tien-lu appeared in
Le Monde (1 10 98). It states, among other
things, that he knew 400 plays by heart.

Electronic Coordinates

The Puppetry Museum of the Netherlands:
http://www. poppenspelmuseum.nl
E-mail: info@poppenspelmuseum.nl
Rose Sage site: http://www.stanford.edu/
“rosesage/
Punch Page: http://www.zapcom.net/
“bcomings/ html/punchpage. html
New Zealand UNIMA is available at:
postmaster@pinz. org.nz

It is maintained by Ramon Rivero, who
writes “We are in the process of compiling
a 1999 International Festivals list to be
published on a web site (which we haven’t
defined yet, but we will let you know).”

If you have any such information please
mail to the above.

The Australian Scene
Penny Francis

The beckoning of a number of Australian
friends and relations - some known only as
a signature on a card or a voice on the
phone - not to mention my attraction to
wide skies and gorgeous landscapes, drew
me to the southern hemisphere last summer.
(Last winter, over there.) It was not meant
to be a busman’s holiday, but I was
surprised and, let’s be honest, delighted to
find so much puppetry in my path. Sydney
was the first port of call, where the
legendary shadow puppeteer Richard
Bradshaw and his wife, Margaret Williams,
welcomed, sheltered and entertained me.
Margaret has been a tutor and researcher in
theatre and puppet theatre at the University
of New South Wales for many years,
though she is now retiring from teaching,
intending to do yet more research and
publishing. Richard is an historian of
puppetry too, and the Bradshaw home in
Bowral, in the rolling open countryside not
far from Sydney, contains enough for a
respectable museum of books, images and
figures. :

One of the priorities of my visit was to
see Richard perform again. It is years since
he played in England (Wales has been
luckier), and IE am one of his most
dedicated fans. Fortunately, he was in the
middle of a very busy time (Book Week in
the schools - yes, they have it too, and
puppeteers are in demand for it, as they are
here); and he had a booking in the Blue
Mountains, what’s more. The school was
set in acres of fields and woodland, and as
he set up I watched the kookaburras and the
brilliant rosellas and other wondrous
wildlife, many of them with little fear of a
nearby human.

His show, a series of short songs and
sketches, was as polished, original, varied
and funny as I remembered it. He does it
all, down to the live speaking and singing.
Every line of the simple silhouettes is full
25

of character and wit, and
they are operated with a
precision and timing that
make the work a perfect
example of the art that conceals art.

The Sydney UNIMA members invited
me to a dinner, a special pleasure, and I
learned a little about their life and
problems. They all seemed busy, either
constructing shows or performing in venues
miles and miles apart. Not unnaturally,
they feel remote from the UNIMA activity
at the centre of Europe, and complained of
the lack of contact with Charleville. Sue
Wallace of the Sydney Puppet Theatre has
the dynamism and charm which builds
UNIMA centres and events and raises funds
— you need something special to keep a
UNIMA focus in such a vast continent.
Imagine having one UNIMA centre for an
area the size of Europe!

Puppetry in Australia, I soon discovered,
almost replicates its situation in Britain.
There are many puppeteers, most of them
struggling to survive with little or no Arts
Council attention or help; some find
television work, though there is not as
much as there is here; most play for
children in schools, some for children with
special needs; the staple fare is fairy and

folk tales, and there is a handful of
companies doing alternative work for
adults. As under the Thatcher years in

Britain, there is little official interest in the
exchange of companies abroad or in
supporting organizations like UNIMA.

One advantage of British puppeteers
which has not yet come to those in Oz, is
the great number of smaller theatres and
arts centres here which regularly engage
performances for children, creating a
substantial amount of employment.
However, there are a very few larger
companies in Australia with their own
building and subsidy, like Spare Parts in
Fremantle, but even Spare Parts is
threatened with demolition, although the

theatre will be incorporated in a new
commercial development, it is said. The
famous Marionette Theatre in Sydney’s old
Rocks area by the harbour is long gone, but
there are hopes of another puppet theatre to
replace it. Handspan continues to enjoy
critical approval in Melbourne, as an
innovative force.

I took a boat to cross the Bay to the
home of another Sydney-based puppeteer.
Jonquil Temple’s Theatre Workshop is
based in an attractive area, and she tours all
over the country to bring puppetmaking and
all-round performance workshops to
children of every level of skill. She takes
large masks and figures with her for
demonstration and practice, the puppets
often operated as fabric body-puppets that
can fold into small spaces. Her enthusiasm
and love for her job and the children she
works with overflow from her. She struck
me as something of an equivalent national
treasure to our Violet Philpott, though
younger. The two flowers, I thought, have
much in common. ;

The next stop was Brisbane, where there
was a prestigious children’s festival called
Out of the Box in the arts complex by the
river, very like our South Bank Centre in
London, but somewhat prettier.
Serendipity continued with me: there were
several puppet companies playing, and one
was co-directed by Peter-Wilson-The-Dark,
or Peter Pan Wilson, lately of Skylark
Theatre in Tasmania. Skylark has run into
a spot of bother, and is no more, but Peter
is continuing his highly successful career as
director of a new company, Skyworks, and
his productions, well subsidized, have been
touring at home and in the States.

At the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane he was
co-director of Twinkle Twinkle Little Fish, a
show that celebrated the illustrative and
narrative talents of Eric Carle, author of
The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was a
large-scale extravaganza for a proscenium
Sia full of colour. transformations and

special effects. Peter was programmed as
“Image Director” and Simon Phillips as
straight “Director,” a nice distinction |
haven’t met before. I enjoyed it very much
as popular entertainment, especially as
there was some excellent manipulation of
the various kinds of puppet, including a lot
of ultra-violet work. I imagined the Image
Director had a lot to do with that!

A few days later I was sitting in a plane
taking me across the country to Perth and
reading the in-flight magazine, when
serendipity caught up with me again. I
found myself staring at the picture of a
puppeteer from France, Philippe
Rodriguez-Jorda, an actor-puppeteer whose
work I admire, once a student at the
Institute in Charleville. He was to play in
an alternative theatre festival, Artrage, full
of mask and mime and puppetry, and he
was performing with another of the
Charleville alumni, an Australian called
Joanne Foley, who has settled in Perth.
She has called her company Foley Bergére,
but also works with Spare Parts of
Fremantle. It is difficult to introduce
puppetry billed for adults in most countries,
but in a small city like Perth Joanne Foley
has a truly uphill struggle. However a
festival like Artrage was a good context for
her elegiac piece The Call (in France, Le
Grand Appel du Vide), in which Foley and
Rodriguez-Jorda operated two half-lifesize
figures in the players’ own likeness. A
woman is working through painful
memories and a wish to die, and uses the
puppets to try and recreate her past. The
piece was slow and melancholy, but
artistically impressive in the performing
and manipulative skills of the two
protagonists.

Spare Parts was dark, sadly, but I looked
around the theatre interior and found Jan
Tregonning in the workshop, making
beautiful sets and puppets for a new
production. Noriko Nishimoto is the
artistic director of Spare Parts, and is

engaging in some interesting partnerships
with other theatre makers and with film and

television, as well as presenting shows of

quality to the Fremantle children.

Australia is not really far away, in any
sense. It’s worth going just for the
puppetry, but you'll be glad you went for
many other reasons, most of all the
wildlife, the space, the long empty beaches,
and the friendly faces everywhere.
Greetings to everyone who welcomed me -
and thanks to my faithful Serendipity.

finite oe ON LINE |!

yy,

=
> BB ooo
COME AND VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT
http://www. prodos.com/AustralianPuppeteer. html

Media Watch
My understanding of the uses to which
puppetry can be put was greatly extended by
“The Limits of Endurance,” the final
programme (23 December) in David
Attenborough’s The Life of Birds, on BBC I.
It showed young, parentless Whooping
Cranes (an endangered species) being raised
at the International Crane Foundation,
Wisconsin, and featured what Attenborough
described as, “one of the most extraordinary
hand-rearing devices ever invented.” The
“operator,” positioned on one side of a door
with a hole in it, inserted through the gap his
hand and arm on which was a lifelike bird’s
beak and long neck, and proceeded to feed
the birds within the adjacent room. The
same long sleeve puppet was donned when
outside, in a field, the “operators,” wearing
white coats and beekeeper’s helmets, ran and
jumped to teach the birds to fly. It was a
wonder the “whoopers” ever did learn to
take off from such galumphing. In a parallel
project, a farmer was shown flying a
microlight followed by young cranes in
preparation for leading them on migration
(they would not otherwise know which

27

direction to take). The elaborate masquerade
was necessary to “avoid humanizing
problems.” It was both amusing and
touching. The only other similar occasion I
have been so engaged was in watching that
now-classic archive footage of the pioneer
ethologist Konrad Lorenz conducting an
“{mprinting” experiment during which he was
adopted by a brood of goslings, who
followed “mother” everywhere — in water
and on land.

An account of similar work with Blue
Cranes in South Affica, including
photographs of conservationists dressed up
as cranes, appeared in The Daily Telegraph
(12 2 99).

Douglas Hayward appeared on
Collector’s Lot (Channel 4, 11 11 98) talking
about his collection in its new Shugborough
home.

The much-acclaimed Shockheaded Peter
returned to The Lyric, Hammersmith, on 17
February. The show, based on the
Struwwelpeter stories of Heinrich Hoffmann,
who was a_doctor in an asylum, combines
puppetry, toy-theatre effects, trick costumes,
and fabulous wigs on a set that. gives the
illusion of a Victorian toy theatre, presided
over by a sinister master of ceremonies. The
Guardian (23 1 99) carries a page-long
interview with Phelim McDermott, co-
director, and Julian Crouch, co-designer and
co-director, plus several members of the cast,
including Martyn Jacques, falsetto and
founder of the Tiger Lilies, and Graeme
Gilmour, co-designer, puppet maker, and
performer (“Part of the magic is that the
puppets are so crap. It’s like kids have made
them. There’s a naivety about them.”).

Novyye Izvestiya (30 10 98) carried an
item on its front page headlined “Theatres
Are Still Being Built in Russia,” which reads:
“The construction of a new municipal puppet
theatre has been completed in Yekaterinburg.
A group of architects from the Urals
Scientific Research Planning Institute led by
Angelina Cheloguzova is responsible for the
original design. The construction work was

completed in less than two years.” A
photograph shows a large impressive-looking
modern building. I have commented several
times on the problem of funding for the arts
in Russia, yet this piece of news may still
seem not so noteworthy. However, put in
context. Yekaterinburg (see Scholarships,
p34) is in as parlous an economic state as
anywhere: a chronic exodus of highly
qualified scientists abroad; schools closed
because they cannot afford to heat them and
flats with a temperature of minus 8-10; a
shortage of staple foods; wages paid in
devalued rubles with months’ delay; and, as
Yekaterinburg TV reported 25 November —
and it is not untypical — a $30-million cancer
centre in the city has been wnder
construction for 10 years and is still
unfinished: the standard scandal of
disappearing state money and conflicts
among different companies and authorities.

The other day I saw a snatch of a Russian
film version of Pinocchio or, to be more
precise, Aleksey Tolstoy’s The Adventures of
Buratino, Pinocchio was played by a young
boy, and the whole affair was rather twee.
That is the last thing Fellini’s abortive
version would have been. Roberto Benigni,
the star of the current, Oscar-nominated Life
is Beautiful, who would have played
Geppetto’s creation in the Fellini film,
declared to an NFT audience on 7
November, during the London Film Festival,
that “To me, Schopenhauer is like
Pinocchio.” | However, before worrying
one’s head overmuch over the precise
relationship of Pinocchio to the 19th-century
German philosopher, it is worth bearing in
mind that the highly-expressive actor also
said “Fellini was a mamma! He was a water
melon!”

Ex-puppeteer Ron Mueck (see short
reference in Bulletin No 98, p 25) did well at
Saatchi’s Britpack art sale in December.
Ron may still be a long way behind Damien
(Hirst’s “The Lovers” realized £139,000),
but “Big Baby 2” (estimated at £6,000-
£10,000) fetched £41,000 on the day.

28

News from the States and Japan
Penny Francis informs us that Nancy Staub,
the organizer of the 1980 world festival of
puppetry in Washington DC, a stalwart of
UNIMA who is knowledgeable in many
aspects of oriental and African puppetry,
being the consultant for the Museum
collection of the Atlanta Puppetry Centre.
as well as a valued correspondent on the
American scene, has written as follows:

“T was thrilled to see the full-page
coverage of puppetry as an art form in The
New York Times on September 6 1998 in
honour of the 4th biennial NY International
Festival (run by the Jim Henson
Foundation). The festival got two full
pages the following Friday and many
reviews throughout its three weeks. Of
course Julie Taymor’s The Lion King and
Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique (over
100 sold-out performances and _ still
running) have received extensive coverage
in The Times as well. There have been or
will shortly be puppet -issues of The
Canadian Theatre Review [No 95, Summer
1998], The Drama Review, and The Asian
Theatre Journal. Julie Taymor graced the
cover of American Theatre in September
and Hanne Tierney’s version of Blood
Wedding was reviewed in Performing Arts
Journal No 60 (1998). There are now three
volumes of The Puppetry Yearbook of
academic papers, with a fourth planned for
this year. Several writers are planning new
general (popular) books on puppetry.”

Penny also informs us that “Sennosuke
Takeda has sent a series of stunning
photographs of his new Museum in lida,
built to house the whole collection of the
Takeda marionettes, once one of Japan’s
most famous touring companies. The
Museum’s exterior and interior must be the
most aesthetically pleasing ever to be
dedicated to our art form. Takeda-san will
run courses in puppetry at the Museum,
wanting it to be a training centre especially
for marionette making and manipulation.

“We congratulate him on _ his
achievement. We are sure he already has
Visitors to this veritable temple for puppets
from all over the world.”

Penny herself, in addition to having
acted as collaborating editor on Henryk
Jurkowski’s two-volume A _ 4History of
European Puppetry and continuing to assist
him with the WEPA (World Encyclopedia of
Puppetry Arts), has also written for the
latest Puck (No 11) an article on Phelim
McDermott and Julian Crouch, the English
version of which is available from us (see
also Media Watch).

Obituaries

Jerzy Grotowski, the radical theorist of the
theatre who emphasized the psychophysical
dimension of performance, died 14 January.
His theories were set out in his book
Towards a Poor Theatre, published in
English in 1968, with a foreword by Peter
Brook, who acknowledged the Pole’s
profound influence on his work (see obituary
in The Times, 20 January). The great
scenographer Jerzy Zitzman died 18
January. He was the director of the
Bielsko-Biata festival and permanent theatre
for many years. A play he designed which
was directed by the French metteur en
scéne Francois Lazaro had some success at
the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years
ago. Jacques Lecoq, the highly influential
master and teacher of mime and mask
theatre, died one day later. Mark Pitman, the
Norwich-based puppeteer, who also teaches
mask and puppetry at Central, was a pupil;
the London-based Theatre de Complicite is
much influenced by Lecoq (see obituaries in
The Guardian 23 January; The Independent,
28 January (John Calder)). Kathleen
Basford, whose researches into the mythic
foliate figure the Green Man resulted in a
book of that same name in 1978, died 20
December.

We have just learned of the death of
Christine Glanville (28 February), who,

29

among other things, was Gerry Anderson’s
chief puppeteer. Full appreciations will
appear in the next issue of Animations and
The Puppetmaster.

Our Belgian “twins” bade farewell to John
Phillips in their publication D’un castelet a
l'autre, No 117. Georges Vetters and
Patricia Plumacker joined the throng of
John’s friends and family at the thanksgiving
service held on 14 November at St Paul’s
Church, Covent Garden, and the reception at
the CAA afterwards, where, along with
puppets from St Antony, we were also able
to see photographs of John, some showing
the “then-lean and seductive Phillips, in natty
hipster flares,” whom most of us did not
know. Artists Notes/19 Winter 1998/1999,
the publication of The Arts Council of
Wales, emphasizes John’s Welsh roots in its
appreciation of his life and is appropriately
written in both the Cymric and English
tongues.

Drawing by Sue
Furse of head of
James Ensor carved
by John Phillips for
Fridolin Unmasked
— an incident in the
life of James Ensor,
a play for
marionettes by John
Furse.

Cribs

Under the heading Nativity play, in his
indispensable Dictionary of Puppetry, AR
Philpott writes: “In his Bench Book, H.W.
Whanslaw mentions a play having 15 to 20
group scenes, presenting biblical scenes,
preserved in the Museum at Verviers,
Belgium, the puppets being converted from
ordinary dolls.” Belgian UNIMA’s latest
annual publication Marionneties en castelet,
No 28, carries an illustrated article “Voici le
Bethléem vervietois,” which describes a
recent performance of a nativity play at the
Musée de l’archéologie et du folklore de
Verviers.

“The crib-makers of Naples have raised
ecclesiastical eyebrows by creating figures of
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to
place alongside the Wise Men and the
shepherds, and also one of the Virgin Mary
giving birth.” For more on the activities of
Giuseppe Ferrigno, whose family has been
making cribs in Naples since 1836, see The
Times, 9 12 98.

A more traditional approach is adopted by
Jaroslav Benda, a farmer from the Czech
Republic, who has been carving crib figures
for most of his 61 years, producing 897 very
nicely executed figurines. He was forced to
work under cover of night during the
Communist period for fear of imprisonment.
The country has .in fact the highest
proportion of nonbelievers in Europe.
However, Mr Benda appropriately creates
his “betlém” in the tiny village of Jerusalem,
named by missionaries after it was converted
to Christianity. Nazareth lies five miles up

the road. (See The Guardian, 24 12 98, for is
more.) ey

Franciszka Themerson
Franciszka Themerson (1907-1988)
worked, along with her husband, Stefan, in
a number of media (for details see article in
Bulletin No 84), which was well
represented in three evenings devoted to
them at the French Institute a couple of

30

years ago. An exhibition “Why is the mind
in the head?” (the title taken from a 1954
oil on canvas) was the latest opportunity
(13 January-11 February 1999) to see her
drawings and paintings. A book entitled
Music, with 96 pages of black and white
drawings of musicians, has also just come
out. It is available for £10, including p&p,
from Art First, first floor, 9 Cork St.
London WIX 1PD or from the Themerson
Archive, 12 Belsize Park Gardens, London
NW3 4LD.

I received the following lines from John
Furse:

“Why is the mind in the head?’ asks
Franciszka Themerson - what can we say to
that? The mistress of the graphic one-liner
surely knows the answer. Tart Thurber
perhaps but something just a little bit more.
The instinctive elegance - doodle plus - is
beguiling.

“Franciszka and Stefan were wonderful
hosts - wonderful company. Stefan’s tales
of times with Kurt Schwitters - Kurt
Schwitters in England is a most delightful
book - never ceased to astound. I have
personal recollections of the afternoon
when John Phillips and I succumbed to the
offer of that little something extra after
lunch. My
recollections are
somewhat
vague. It was
the Brandy that
did it.”

Drawing from
Themerson Music,
published by the
Themerson estate,
1998.

Byte Parts

It was interesting to read Matthew Sweet
arguing (The Independent, 28 | 99) that CGI
(computer-generated image) is _ still
unconvincing and that digital technology will
never completely replace physical-effects
techniques. Indeed, the rubber puppet
dinosaur is, it seems, due for a comeback.
He cites Heather Kenyon, editor-in-chief of
the Hollywood-based industry journal
Animation Worldwide Network: “The smart
people have realised that models have a
warm organic quality that CGI can’t
replicate.” Must admit I can warm to old
King Kong in a way that I do not to the
recent Godzilla. Let me quote the original
(1928) Kong’s screaming blonde co-star, Fay
Wray (from a page-long interview in The
Guardian, 5 11 98): “Cooper [Meriem C
Cooper, co-director] showed me some
alarming drawings of this great monster
climbing the side of a skyscraper, but
reassured me that Kong was only 18" tall and
that it was all done by animation. It’s a huge
achievement how much feeling they got into
that animation. The final scene is really
moving, where Kong is shot as he stands on
the Empire State Building, and clutches his
breast, but then stretches out his hand to
where I am. A great piece of acting from
that little fellow.”

In the CGI camp, though, the 30-strong
Pepper’s Ghost Productions (a venerable
name in the art of illusion) has been set up in
Kingston to take on the Hollywood makers
of Toy Story, Aniz, and A Bug’s Life. (See
The Independent, 7 12 98, for details.)

Channel 4’s Dope Sheet (late on
Tuesdays) has been of consistently high
quality. I particularly liked the Yuri Norstein
edition (15 12 98). His work is a long time
in progress — the conditions for small studios
are difficult — but the results, as in the
Greatcoat, are extraordinary. Another
edition (19 1 99) conducted a poll to find the
world’s top animators: Park and Svankmajer
were, I’m certain, first and second; Norstein
came third, as I recall. Polls can be fatuous,

31

but this one had the advantage of being
conducted among a peer group of renowned
fellow-animators.

Very useful background on the BBC’s
The Canterbury Tales can be found in an
article in The Guardian, 19 12 98, by
Jonathan Myerson (who wrote the script)
and an article in The Independent on Sunday,
20 12 98, by Robin Buss (also on the inside
track, his wife being a Russian interpreter
who has been involved in the cooperative
projects with Russian animators since their
Animated Shakespeare beginnings 10 years
ago). The pilgrimage, which links the tales,
is stop-motion animation with latex figures
(about 10" tall), for which Aida Zyablikova
in Moscow was responsible; while the tales
themselves are mainly two-dimensional cel
animation. The animators’ styles varied
widely: Nun’s Priests’ Tale (Dave
Antrobus), the Knight’s Tale (Antrobus and
Mic Graves), the Wife of Bath’s Tale
(Joanna Quinn), the Merchant’s Tale (Valeri
Ugarov), the Pardoner’s Tale (Sergei
Olifirienko), and the Franklin’s Tale
(Damian Gascoigne).

The tales were enterprisingly broadcast in
contemporary and Middle English versions.
Myerson says “my intention has always been
to bring the dialogue up to date,” but advises
that you “stick with the Middle for as long as
possible. It’s real, it’s chewy and honest, and
above all it’s English. And you might start to
feel that, on the edge of the millennium, 600
years isn’t such a long time.”

Soyuzmultfilm, set up in the USSR in the
mid-thirties, has now almost entirely given
way to the private enterprise company
Christmas Films. Beowulf, directed by Yuri
Kulakov, was also a Christmas treat from
Russia (BBC 2, 23 12 98).

Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master and
Margarita, one of my favourite novels, is
going to be made as a full-length (104
minutes) animated cartoon, which should
appear in 2000 (the 60th anniversary of the
novel’s appearance). Given the rather
inadequate screen version made of it a few

years ago, it is good to know that Marietta
Chudakova, president of the Mikhail
Bulgakov Fund, is chief consultant on the
new film (see ITAR-TASS agency report, 22
12 98, for more details).

The holiday season, as usual, saw a lot of
animation on the little screen, from the
charmingly traditional appearance of
Petrushka, directed and directed by Alan
Platt (C4, 28 12 98) to the off-beat, pastry-
cutter look of Aardman’s Rex the Runt. |
particularly enjoyed the penultimate episode
(on New Year’s Day) thanks in no small part
to the voices of Bob Monkhouse and
Professor Stanley Unwin. Wallace does
make an appearance in the dog show,
demonstrating that animation can be
intertextual. Also liked the episode of Bugs
Bunny “Produced, directed and plagiarized
by Tex Avery.”

I shall pass over in silence DreamWorks’
The Prince of Egypt (though Gilbert Adair
thought it “The dumbest story ever told”)
because I have not seen it, and Disney’s
recall — at huge expense — of 3.4 million
copies of The Rescuers because there is
nothing to see. The official explanation is
that it contains “two frames with an
objectionable background.” But then I don’t
play records backwards either.

Festivals
Moving Parts 1999, Huddersfield’s festival
of puppetry and animation, stages its main
events 7-11 April. See enclosed leaflet.

Blackpool mounts Puppet Up! 99 7-16
May, which will feature Philippe Genty on
the 15th. We should also like to mention the
exhibition (at the Grundy Gallery as of 13
March) of the Delvaine Marionettes, which
toured the world in the 19th century. A full
page is devoted to the festival in the
February-March issue of Animations and
further details are available from the Festival
Office on 01253 292 486.

Streets Ahead, Greater Manchester’s free

festival of major foreign and many British-
32

based puppetry companies, takes place in
May. This will include Amoros et Augustin
from France with “Latest news of the
Bounty,” an outdoor shadow performance
with an enormous screen and _ stage
(Castlefield Arena, Manchester, 10pm 21, 22
May). The results are said to be
“breathtaking,” and if you have seen their
other shows you will believe this. Big Nazo
comes from the United States with a large-
scale version of Spitting Image-type puppets;
France’s Utopium brings fairy tales with a
sting in the tail; compatriots Zanimos present
a “delightful animated fruit and vegetable
market staii”; while Spain’s La Fanfarra has a
new solo show. For details telephone 0161
224 0020.

Harrogate: The Punch and Judy
Fellowship, in conjunction with Harrogate
Borough Council, is presenting a Punch and
Judy Festival in the recently-restored 1930s
Sun Pavilion in Harrogate and _ the
surrounding Valley Park. Dates are 17 and
18 April. Ten professors are scheduled to
perform shows from 10-4 pm each day.
There is also a shadow show, Zhe Three
Golden Hairs, by Ruffege (Mark Dobson
and Helen Fry). There will be an exhibition
of Punch memorabilia, which will include a
special feature of bygone Harrogate
Professors Candler and Bailey. There will be
a talk on the history of Punch and a
children’s puppetmaking workshop.

Refreshments will be available during the
day and you will be able to purchase Punch
and Judy souvenirs etc. Bottling may well be
the only income for those taking part, as no
funding is available at present. All
BrUNIMA members and friends are invited,
and any puppeteer interested in presenting
shows at the festival should contact Des (the
Pres) Turner, Richmond House, 2 Benington
Rd, Aston, Stevenage SG2 7DX; tel: 01438
880376.

This is, I know, the PJF’s first excursion
outside of London for a while. It looks a
very good event.

QOD SS ES

33

The Canadian marionettist Ronnie
Burkett, following his recent appearance at
the Green Room, Manchester, will be
presenting Tinka’s New Dress at the
Barbican Centre 23 June-10 July (see article
in Canadian Theatre Review, Summer
1998).

A performance of wayang kancil, a
modern form with roots in traditional
shadow puppetry styles, will take place on
the afternoon of 13 June at South Weald
Country Park, just outside Brentwood, Essex
(M25, J28). The performance, part of a
fundraising event for the park, will be
accompanied by the Golden Deer gamelan,
Kidang Kencana.

This form of wayang kancil was
developed in the 1980s by Ki Ledjar
Subroto, a Yogyakarta-based puppetmaker
and puppeteer, as an “environmentally

sound” wayang primarily aimed at a young
audience.

The performances use the well-
known Indonesian
fables of Kancil, the
ingenious mouse
deer, as a vehicle for
environmental/social
education.

Details of exact
time and location have yet to be finalized.
These will be forthcoming in the next
Newsletter, or alternatively contact Sarah
Bilby, Golden Deer Shadow Theatre (tel:
01708 454955/766005; email: § sarah@
goldendeer.demon.co.uk),

Millennium News
PuppetLink, the consortium of five small
puppet companies in the Midlands, has been
awarded funding by the Millennium Festival
of England for an event called The Great
Midlands Millennium Puppet Party. The
event is to be a festival of traditional
puppetry harnessing the popularity of Mr
Punch and his international clan of rowdy
relatives and celebrating the heritage of folk
and street puppetry. It will take place in
May 2000 at a number of sites in the

Midlands, including MAC, the Museum of
Cannock Chase, and in Kidderminster (which
is twinned with Husum in Germany, where a
regular major festival takes place).

Corrections and Clarifications
Overcompression may have suggested that
the Jomon exhibition was just figures; there
were in fact more pots than figures, with
some ornaments, and a few masks. The
formal deformity, symbolizing particular
expressions, of the Jomon masks, the oldest
dating from around 1,500 BC, lives on in
bugaku.

The spelling Li Tien-lu is preferable to
Lee Tien-lu, both were used in the last
Bulletin, the latter by your editor (mea
culpa). The Chinese of Taiwan have stuck
to the Wade-Giles romanization system, the
People’s Republic of China uses pinyin,
according to which the spelling of the above
name would seem to be Li Tian-lu (at least
that is what is given in brackets as an
alternative after Li Tien-lu in the chapter on
Hou Hsiao-hsien in Kwok-kan Tam and
Wimal Dissanayake’s New Chinese Cinema,
OUP, though I thought pinyin did not use
hyphens). To complicate matters further — in
Southeast Asia, Chinese names are spelt
according to dialectal pronunciation. Why
make such a fuss? Simply to make a point
and a plea to contributors to check the
spelling of names in their copy. It is polite to
get people’s names right, but it is very
difficult, sometimes impossible in fact, to
establish the correct form, as well as being
time consuming, at the editorial stage.
Sometimes you will notice real, other times
apparent, inconsistencies: for example,
dhalang represents a rendering of Javanese,
while dalang is what one would use in
Indonesian or Sundanese; some cited names
represent preorthographic reform in
Indonesian, others come after it. We do our
best, but stand to be corrected, and welcome
your comments across the board.

Rise Phoenix’s address is Perren, not
Perrin, St.

Housekeeping

The deadline for the next Bulletin is 1 June;
the deadline for the Newsletter is 1 April.
Please remember to include programmes and
the like with any articles submitted, as this
provides useful information and possible
illustrations. Such material will, of course,
be returned.

The editor’s email address has changed
yet again (see end page), though you will still
get through on the old one for a while.

Europe Commission: International
Festival Scholarships
The Europe Commission, in collaboratica
with certain international puppets festivals,
offers scholarships for UNIVA members —
see back.page.
These scholarships cover lodging, food, and
free entry to the shows.
Members interested in attending
festivals must send their applications to:
Alberto Cebreiro, Europe Commission
International UNIMA, Ronda del Port, 5-7a
46128 ~ Alboraya (Valencia), Spain. Fax:
34-6-3555137; email: alberto.ce@teleline.es
The’ application must contain the following
information:
name and surnames; date of birth; address;
telephone / fax.
Proof of membership of your UNIMA
national centre, ie photocopy of membership
card — this is essential to begin processing.
Your relationship to puppet theatre
(professional, amateur, educational, research
etc).
Name of the institution, group, or theatre in
which you work.
You can indicate by order of priority up to
five festivals that you would like to attend.
All applications that meet these requirements
will be accepted. If the quota is filled a
waiting list will be opened and you will be
informed in due course.
These scholarships are addressed to UNIMA
members who are unable, for various
reasons, to attend international festivals.
These scholarships are to attend as observers

these

34

and not with performances

These scholarships are granted by strict date
of application. There is no selection.

Once the scholarship has been granted and
accepted, the beneficiary assumes a serious
and formal commitment. Only if very serious
and justified reasons are forthcoming can the
beneficiary relinquish the scholarship. In
which case s/he snould inform the
Commission as soon as possible so that it
may be granted to someone else.

Once the scholarship has been used the
Europe Commission should be sent a report
on the festival attended covering the
organization of the festival, the
oerformances, and areas for consideration
and improvement.

BrUNIMA members were quick to take up’
scholarships: these have included Diana Bayliss,
Robert Frith, Rachel Riggs, Helen Fry, Stephen
Sharples and Michelle Quick. The latter two kindly
sent in reports to us, which, as they covered the same
ground, have been compressed and combined,
emploving “we” rather than “I.” without, it is hoped.
distorting opinion.

Treasure Trove on the Alicante
festival
Stephen Sharples and Michelle Quick

When we saw that the UNIMA Europe
Commission was offering scholarships we
circled the two festivals that most appealed
and fitted in with our work schedule and sent
off our applications. Three months later
came the reply informing us that our request
to attend the 11" Festival Internacional de
Titeres in Alicante, Spain, had been
accepted. We arrived on 3 December and
left on 10 December. Although the festival
was for 10 days, festival funds did not run to
cover the full period. This was a great pity
because it meant we missed the State Theatre
of Nizhniy Novgorod, which was to perform
in the Teatro Principal, usually reserved for
opera and ballet. It was to be the highlight
of the festival, as Angel Casado, the artistic
director of the festival explained as he took
us around the theatre.

We enjoyed full board — breakfast in the
hotel and vouchers for meals at the Casino —
and a free pass to all the shows, which gave a
wonderful sense of freedom.

All the venues (there were seven main
ones, ranging from churches and parks to
theatres) were easily reachable on foot, and
we got a real feel for Alicante that way,
enjoying exploring in Spain’s warmer
December climate the older part of the town
and admiring the architecture of the
buildings, which, although a bit crumbled in
places, retain their unspoilt beauty.

The festival was well organized and
publicized, which meant the general public
and puppetry enthusiasts attended.

One of the first performances we saw was
by the Freyer Theatre, from Ljubljana, which
performed a Nativity, the design of which
was based directly on frescoes from Istria,
and cleverly concealed political and social

messages about the unrest in former
Yugoslavia, particularly Slovenia. The
puppets, made from an __ interesting

combination of carved wooden heads, cloth
hands, and sculpted fabric, were performed
in the cloisters of the Concatedral de San
Nicolas. We wondered why Mary was
dressed in brown rather than blue: One of
the three performers told us that the cost of
blue pigment was too expensive at the time
the frescoes were painted (1470), and they
wanted to keep the puppets as close to the
original paintings as possible.

One of our favourite companies — seen
three times in different venues —~ was De
Trozos Titeres, with a captivating show
centred on a fisherman, hence the title
Carlitos Pescador. It was a booth-type
show with two performers. We could
picture this in Covent Garden or on the
cabaret circuit quite easily.

Los Duendes, from Valencia, performed
La Bella Durmiente (Sleeping Beauty). This
played to a packed house at the Auditorio
CAM, the muppet-type figures superbly
operated by Alberto Cebreiro and his wife.

35

There were also beautifully crafted pieces
like The Happy Prince by Els Aquilinos,
from Catalunya, who created a magical
world on stage. We particularly liked their
use of scale, ranging from a miniature paper
theatre which opened up from the floor (in
contrast) to an enormous Prince. We were in
awe aS we watched the two performers
manipulate the puppets and scenery with
great skill — their acting was superb. The
first half of Los Bufos de la Matinée by El
Chonchon, from Argentina, which paid
tribute to the lost days of silent cinema —
Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy — was
great, but it then lost us. Tanti Cosi Progetti,
from Italy, performed a grotesque muppet-
type version of The Three Little Pigs, which
had the audience enthralled: excellent voices
and intriguing, mechanical staging. A sort of
Faulty Optic meets the three little pigs.

Most of the companies had two-four
operators, with the exception of Poland’s
Opolski Theatre and the 12-strong Russian
company. Opolski was unable to perform
Pastoral because the intended venue, a
church, was undergoing major refurbishment.
Its other show, E/ Tigre Pedro, done in West
End musical style, was a favourite. Its six
operators used 4ft-high rod puppets for
characters reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh
and Tigger — they were a little like stuffed
toys with movement in their limbs and a
short rod to their heads. The action was
excellent, with the puppeteers, as well as the
puppets themselves, taking on the characters.
The stage was alive with puppetry and song
and numerous scenes where Pedro has to
show his bravery and earn his stripes.
Although the festival was international (it
was the 15th puppet festival held there, the
1lth as an international event), it was a
festival designed to be accessible to the local
audiences — it was a big annual event in the
community — with the majority of shows
being in Spanish. We saw 20 performances
of different types of puppetry — rod, glove,
table-top, and mixed media — and seven
exhibitions and met numerous puppeteers.
We were very impressed by the high standard

of work and the ingenious, inspiring ideas.

Some of the puppets and sets were works of The table below has been compiled — to the best of
art in their own right. It was an excellent — our ability ~ from information received, but it is up
festival and a great time was had. to members to verify the data.

AVAILABLE SCHOLARSHIPS FOR PERIOD 1999-2000

Country City Month Annual Total Number Number
Number 1999/2000 Requested Available
Argentine Santa Fe September 99 (biennial) 2 2 0 2
Belgium Gent! July 2 4 2 (1999) 2
Bulgaria Varna" October 99 (triennial) 6 6 6 0
Croatia Zagreb Sept 2 4 0) 4
Slovakia Topol’éianky 3-5 Sept 2 4 1 3
Banska Bystrica 14-19 Sept 2 4 0 4
Spain Alicante Dec 2 4 0 4
Cuenca May 99 (biennial) 2 2 0 2
Lleida May 2 4 1 (2000) 3
Segovia May 2 4 2 (1999) 2,
Seville May l 2 1 (1999) l
Tolosa Nov 2 + 2 (1999) Z
France Charleville Sept 2000 5 5 0
Netherlands Dordrecht Jun 2 + 2 (1999) 2
Italy Santelpidio Jul 2 4 0 4
Perugia Aug-Sept 2 4 1 (1999) 3
Mexico Mexico City Jul 2 4 0 4
Morelos Mar 2 + 0 4
Tlaxcala Aug 2 4 1 (1999) 3
Poland Opole Oct 99 (biennial) 3 3 0 3
Portugal Evora May 99 (biennial) 2 2 2 0
Czech Republic Prague June 2 4 2 (99), I (00)) 1
Russia Yekaterinburg’ Sep 2 4 0 4

' Gent requires that you participate in the organization work for five days before and after the festival.

2 Scholarships will be extended a week subsequent to the festival to enable people to attend a course in the
Varna Institute of Arts and to analyse the festival performances,

3 This festival pays the Moscow-Yekaterinburg leg of the trip.

The British Centre of Union Internationale de la Marionnette
Hon President: John Blundall Chair: Ray DaSilva Vice Chair: Glyn Edwards
General Secretary: Lorraine von Gehlen, Cross Border Arts, Wysing Arts Centre, Fox Road, Bourn,
Cambridge CB3 7TX. Tel 01954718 181 email lorraine@cba.castern-arts.co.uk
Membership Secretary & Treasurer: Martin MacGilp, 10 Cullernic Gardens, Balloch, Inverness [V2 7JP.
Tel 01463 792149
Editor of Bulletin: Robert Fowler, 44 Bexley Court. Reading, Berks. RG30 2DY. Tel 0118 957 6528
e-mail: ROBERTF/@RCCB.OSIS.GOV

Editors of Newsletter: Helen Fry and Mark Dobson, 5a Garnet House, Garnet St, Wapping, London E1 9QY
Tel 0171-481-8732 cmail ruffege@hotmail.com